


Red Right Hand

by onthesea_mystery



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gangsters, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Alternative Universive, Angst, Communism, Getting Together, M/M, POV Multiple, Peaky Blinders - AU, Post-World War I, Slow Burn, Small gangs, set in the 1900s
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-22
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-04-26 03:38:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 33,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14393502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onthesea_mystery/pseuds/onthesea_mystery
Summary: “You have my common sense,” she said, finally, “but your father’s devilment. I see them fighting. Don’t let him win.”—1919. The Lynch Brother’s front a small time gang in Small Heath, Birmingham. But the small time isn’t enough for Ronan Lynch. He wants an empire, and with the unexpected help of an unassuming, enigmatic new bar hand, Adam Parrish, it just might be possible.Peaky Blinders - AU





	1. Chapter 1

##### Birmingham, England — 1919

—

_Past the square, past the bridge, past the mills, past the stacks_  
_On a gathering storm comes a tall handsome man_  
_In a dusty black coat with a red right hand_  
  
Red Right Hand — Nick Cave  & The Bad Seeds

—

The world twisted into a shadow of itself in the depths of Small Heath, Birmingham.

A thick grayness hung in the lungs and the eyes of those small people who scraped through the stilted streets, huddled and faint and growing smaller by the day. They were whispers of themselves in the ever growing fester.

Ronan Lynch could smell the rot in them, a bile born of hard labour, generations of suffering and strife, and death wrought by the hand charged with protecting them. 

Ronan Lynch had his own rot that seeped low in his gut, but unlike those tiny peons of Small Heath, Birmingham, Ronan didn’t nurture his rot. It nurtured him. 

The chill nipped at the exposed skin of his neck. The streets chided and ebbed around him. It smelled of ore and fire and piss. The shrieking of children stilled as he went past them. On Watery Lane, men tipped their hats to him, shouted, _Afternoon, Mr. Lynch!_ and _Good on yah, Ronan!_ and _Morning, sir!_ in their heavy brummie accents.

Ronan Lynch paid no mind to the people of the streets, the men in uniforms that bowed from his path, the women who eyed him like meat. His mind was poised for business today and today he rode bareback atop a startling horse, white and grey and strong. The horse was named Monaghan Boy. Monaghan Boy was to win Ronan Lynch a lot of money.

Ronan pulled on the reins of the beautiful beast, halting it in the center of an empty street. The horse reared high, whinnying clear and shrill through the sudden stillness. Ronan rubbed his hand against it’s neck, buried his face into the pale mane and whispered soothingly against it’s flesh. The horse fell calm beneath him like a shiver.

Ronan looked up. At the end of the lane was a girl, not yet the age of puberty. Her skin was a faint olive, her eyes wide and round. 

When she saw that Ronan had seen her, she ran to meet him, stopping just short of the horse. The girl put her nose to the horse’s snout and breathed, in and out, in and out. 

The horse whistled irritably, but did not flinch when the girl’s hand ran down the length of it’s nose. 

She was whispering to it just as Ronan had done, though he could understand the words. Monaghan Boy watched her curiously.

Ronan could feel eyes upon him, eyes from windows, from behind the washing hung out to dry, from behind the barrels of ale. He could feel the curiosity of the eyes, the fear. The reverence. 

The girl took one step back from the horse, then another. The quiet lane held it’s breath as she reach into her pocket. She then brought a closed fist before her face and slowly pealed her fingers open and blew.

A saturated red powder, swirling and vibrant, stung through the air. The horse sniffed at it, inhaled it, threw it’s head back in anger. Or maybe it was fear.

Around them, the street shifted in anticipation. 

The young girl bowed. Ronan flipped her two coins, and she was gone.

He spun the horse in an agitated circle. 

“The horse is called Monaghan Boy. He’s at Kempton, 3 o’clock Monday.” Ronan’s voice carried like the sound of a cannon. 

Again, the street tittered. 

He pulled at the reigns again and pushed away from the quiet, curious lane. His work for the morning was complete.

—

Back on Watery Lane, a dirty street with identical houses squashed into identical rows, sat a house that looked like the rest. Ronan Lynch cut through the street towards it, tossing the last of his cigarette into the gutter. He didn’t knock, but pulled off his peaked flat cap and shoved it under his arm before pushing the door open.

The parlor of the house was dark—the grimy front windows let next to no light in, and the smoldering fire in the hearth was a sadness that seeped. There was exposed brick beneath a pealing floral wallpaper and the air hung stagnant with rose incense. 

Ronan moved deftly through the quietness of the house, towards a small dining room with another hearth and another neglected fire. The wall opposite the fireplace was draped in a thick velvet curtain. He tossed his hat onto the dining room table and shoved the curtains away from the wall.

Behind the curtain were two wide doors, splintered and green with chipped paint. 

He pushed them open.

This part of the house was far from quiet. 

A long, thin room. Men in collared shirts, folded torsos over books. Men counting coins from upturned hats. Men shouting numbers to each other. Men in lines, setting bets, placing wagers. 

It was a cacophony of masculinity, a symphony of debauchery. Ronan was alive with the noise of it. 

At the far end of the room, a chalkboard filled up an entire wall with a man cut from marble scratching numbers into slots. 

“4 to 1!” The man cut from marble had a severe haircut, sheared at the sides, long and slicked in the middle. His name was Gansey. “Give me the 2:30 at Kempton! Where’s Monaghan Boy at now, boys?”

“2 to 1!” Someone shouted back from amidst the clamor. Bodies shunt themselves in and out through a back door. Men in their greased and grimed work clothes queued at a rickety desk. A man took their names, there, and their money.

Ronan peaked over the shoulder of the bookie. All the bets placed within the last two hours bore a single name. _Monaghan Boy._

Above the rush of it, another voice, harder and louder than the rest. Ronan hated that voice.

“Ronan!” He ignored it, flipped over the page of the book to inspect the rest of the days takings. “Ronan!”

The voice was an incessant thing. Ronan flipped another page before looking up. A man that might have been Ronan’s twin (that is if he had a twin and his twin was an intolerable prick) was watching from the other side of the room. The look on this man’s face was pure murder. “Ronan. Get in here now.”

Ronan obliged, which was quite out of the ordinary considering Ronan usually avoided his brother Declan at all costs. 

Once inside Declan’s office, Declan slammed the door shut. The glass panes rattled. Ronan peered through them, watched the bustle of their gambling den like a hawk might watch a rat.

“You were seen doing the powder trick down on Midland lane.” Declan’s voice was a curious thing when he’d been drinking. Not quite a slur, but close to it. It rattled like a kettle of tea might just before it screeched, boiling.

“What of it?” Ronan asked, shrugging. “Everyone needs a reason to lay a bet.”

“That girl is a witch, Ronan.”

“If that’s what the women believe, then let them.”

“We don’t mess with those—”

“Have you seen the books, Declan?”

Declan was close to screeching now. He slammed his fist onto his desk. His face was nearing on bright red.

“The Chinese have cutters of their own.”

Ronan shook his head slowly. “We agreed.”

Declan looked up at him from his seat behind that big wooden desk of his. As angry and as red as he was, Ronan thought he looked pathetically small. 

“I’m in charge of bringing in new business,” Ronan continued, after it seemed like Declan had cooled, if only minimally.

“What if that bloody horse of yours wins?” Declan asked, voice dipping into a dangerous timbre, an octave Ronan avoided at all costs, if he could. Declan dangerous was a Declan to avoid. “We fixing races now, hm? You get permission from Kavinsky?”

Declan stood then, slow as molasses, and met Ronan nose to nose where he leaned against the wall. “You think we can take on Joseph Kavinsky and his fucking ARMY?”

He was red in the face again. Ronan hated him like this. Hated him most ways.

Ronan took a step back from his brother. “I _think_ , Declan. That’s _my_ job.” 

He backed his way to the door, a kindling simmering low in his chest. He wrenched open the door, looked over his shoulder. “I think, so no one has to worry that you might try to.”

“There’s a copper coming from Belfast,” Declan all but snarled, hands like claws on the edge of his desk. “Family meeting. Tonight. Be there.”

Ronan paused, took a slow breath in, then slammed Declan’s office door behind him as he left.

—

The chance was high that Secretary of State Winston Churchill was vastly under-informed on the workings of Small Heath, Birmingham. Not that Barrington Whelk minded this small detail. In fact, he preferred it when he was left to his own devices. When left to his own devices, Barrington was nothing less than exceptionally efficient.

The city itself was a cesspool of inbreeding, immigrants, and the impoverished, infiltrated by Bolsheviks and IRA scum alike, not to mention the host of small gangs infesting every other block. Barrington’s blood boiled imagining the twisted, immoral acts that went on behind closed doors here. 

His train rattled furiously into the dingy station. A man sat across from him, sleeping, snoring, drooling. Barrington wanted to reach out and kick his shin for being so deplorable, but he kept to himself, shuffled his files together from the tray in front of him, and closed them back into his case. 

It was a rather informative train ride, if it lacked anything in the way of peace.There was the matter of the guns to attend to. A most important matter, as they were _missing guns._ Stollen from one of the proofing bays on the bank of the canal. 

Deploying Chief Inspector Barrington Whelk was not a decision made lightly—he was pulled from Northern Ireland specifically for this job, which meant it was of utmost importance to his Majesty King George that the matter was resolved swiftly, and discreetly. 

He stepped off the train into the filth of the city. Immediately the scent of sewage assaulted him. He had half a mind to pull his kerchief from around his neck and tuck his nose into it. 

Only when he found a free cabbie and was safely tucked inside, windows drawn up tight, headed via the fastest possible route to the local precinct, did he pull the files from his case once more. The names were familiar by now, having studied each suspect with an eager sort of derision: Henry Cheng, prominent communist rabbler. Declan Lynch, Irish, lengthy arrest record, veteran of the War, leader of the local Peaky Blinders, and his brother, Ronan Lynch, also Irish, equally long arrest record, and decorated War hero. 

According to his sources within the force, it was the Peaky Blinders who controlled Small Heath, and it was the Peaky Blinders he would start with. Small time criminals and IRA sympathizers received no compassion from the likes of Barrington Whelk. He enjoyed dismantling organizations and their members piece by piece, even if it meant the slow, dissolved torture of a few key informants. Dismantling. Dismembering. Were they really two such different things, anyway?

—

The Garrison was a large and brimming establishment considering its position within Small Heath. Abutted by two steel mills, and across from a large, crumbling warehouse, it catered to a very specific clientele, if that’s what you could call them, those dreary and day worn men from the factories, women with red tired faces, and boys, too young for steady work, but old enough to forgo school.

Ronan was what one might call a regular at The Garrison. When he pushed his way through the mosaicked double doors, slid up to the counter, and ordered himself a whiskey, the barman, a prudish middle aged man named Harry, passed over a glass as if he’d been waiting for Ronan to turn up. “On the house, Mr. Lynch.”

Ronan dropped two coins on the counter anyway and took the whiskey down in one gulp. Harry was there, diligently refilling his glass as soon as it touched back against the bar.

He cradled this second round between two hands, let the ire seep away from him. Declan caused a riot in him, mutinous and unruly, and on top of everything, _everything_ , he didn’t need dissent among the ranks. He needed loyalty, especially now, especially from his family, as much as they made him want to skin himself alive.

He sipped his drink as someone sidled up to the otherwise empty length of bar. They were far enough away from Ronan for him to make out the line of their profile from the corner of his eye. He knew that profile. Avoided it, though mostly loathed it. 

“Another, Harry,” Henry Cheng said. Harry refilled Henry’s ale in silence. Ronan pulled a cigarette from his case, lit it, eyes trained at the line of liquor behind the bar.

He knew Henry was here to talk with him. Or, rather, _at him_. It didn’t seem to matter to Henry; he just liked the sound of his own voice. He just needed people, preferably large groups of people, hanging off his every word. Ronan would admit that Henry was a skilled orator. Most people would agree, and that was the issue, wasn’t it? The worship of Henry Cheng down at the factories. He wore his red scarf with pride, resident Bolshevik number one. It gave him an insufferable sense of importance, as if he would save England and her empire singlehandedly, as if everyone owed him their time. 

Henry Cheng was a thorn lodged deep into the back of Ronan’s hand. Always had been. 

As if to prove himself the worst sort of person, Henry reached along the bar and snagged one of Ronan’s coins, flipped it to Harry as payment. 

Ronan’s composure, which, up until this point, had been immaculate, flickered. His eyes darkened. Henry smirked, lifted his pint. “Cheers.” 

Ronan took a long, thoughtful drag from his cigarette. He felt Henry’s eyes like a hawk. He knew he was being sized up, and with Henry Cheng, it could be for anything. And so Ronan waited—he did not play into these games, as much as Henry tried to provoke him.

“You know,” Henry finally said, some minutes later, watching Ronan roll his cigarette into an ashtray, “one of my comrades has a sister who works at telegraph office at the Monmouth Factory. There have been messages. From London. Winston Churchill himself”

Ronan was a master of self-possession. It came from the years he and his brothers spent on the streets. It was solidified in France, in the tunnels, when there was nothing left but the certainty of their deaths. He knew how easy it was to reveal intention with a single look or movement. He knew how little people could be trusted, how little he could trust himself. His equilibrium was balanced as if on the edge of a knife, and yet he prided his placidness, the inscrutability for which he had come to be known.

Even now, in the face of Declan’s warning just twenty minutes ago, and now this, from none other than his longest withstanding enemy, Ronan’s face remained stoic. His body was a statue.

But the true problem with Henry Cheng was neither his political affiliation, nor his acute ability to raise Ronan’s hackles. It was the certainty at which he could read Ronan’s every mood. They had been the closest of friends before France, after all. 

Ronan considered it his greatest period of personal weakness.

Henry shifted down the bar. He was watching Ronan closely. “A robbery,” he continued. “Of national significance.”

Ronan was looking into the swirl of grey and black ash before him. He continued poking the end of his cigarette into it, despite it having been put out minutes ago. 

“There was a list of names, of course.” Henry took a large gulp of ugly, amber ale. Ronan felt a buzzing in his ear. Henry was so close now. It was like it was just the two of them at the bar. But no, not at the bar, under ground, surrounded by crumbling dirt and the slow dull ebb of explosions from above. It was painfully familiar, just Ronan and Henry and whispered secrets below the earth.

But Henry didn’t seem to be remembering their time in the tunnels. “On that list,” he was saying from some far off place, “was your name and my name together. Now, what kind of list would have the name of a communist and a bookmaker side by side?”

The buzzing in Ronan’s ears had subsided greatly, though now it felt like his very blood was tingling. He picked up his whiskey, held it out, smirked to no one but himself. “It was probably list of men who give false hope to the poor.” Only then did he turn and make eye contact with Henry. There were a million words unspoken between them. They created a gulf so wide, it was amazing Ronan ever thought they knew each other.

Henry huffed out a disbelieving laugh. Ronan hated that sound, the condescension, as if he were any better than Ronan. “You know,” Henry was saying, as Ronan downed the last of his second whiskey, “there are times when I hear about all the beatings and cuttings you and your lot get up to that I really wish I’d let you take that bullet in France.”

Ronan huffed out a laugh of his own. He felt the cruelty of this man and this world and the whole pathetic joke of his entire life bundled into a single moment. “Believe me, there are nights when I wish you had.”

—

They were spaced around a long wooden table in the house on Watery Lane. Declan, as eldest, stood at the head of the table. Gansey had his leg up on the seat of a chair; he was smoking.

Opal kept to herself, mostly, seated across from the Lynch matriarch. Aurora was once a beautiful creature, but years of toil had taken the life from her hair and the rosiness out of her cheeks. She was thin, but strong boned, and sat rigidly in her chair. She watched Ronan intently, as if she suspected him of something.

Ronan was leaning against the door frame, quiet and removed and watchful. He hated the way his mother’s eyes roved over his face. She, like Henry Cheng, had a knack for knowing when Ronan was keeping something from them.

“These were found in a pub on the Shankhill Road,” Declan said with enough gravitas that the room must have shook beneath him. He passed a stack of flyers around the table. Each member of the family, save Matthew, who was much to young to read yet, took one.

“ _If you’re over five feet and can fight, come to Birmingham_ ,” Gansey read. He looked up, immediately, catching Ronan’s eye. Ronan avoided eye contact, lit a cigarette, took a steadying drag. 

“They’re recruiting Protestant Irishman to come to Birmingham as Specials,” Declan intoned from the front of the room. He too was watching Ronan. 

“To do what?” Opal asked from the table.

“To clean up to the city,” Ronan barked. “The man they sent is a chief inspector. From Belfast.”

“Belfast?” Gansey crumpled the flyer in his hand, tossed it and the rest of the pile into the simmering hearth. 

“That’s where he’s been clearing out the IRA.” Ronan tossed his flyer into the fire as well. 

“How do you know so bloody much?” Declan asked. He head was titled down, eyes flicked up. He looked like a demon, the lines of his face casting dark shadows into the deep set of his eyes. Yes, Declan was drinking much too much anymore. He was skin and bones. 

“I asked the coppers on our payroll,” Ronan said around his cigarette. 

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’m telling you.”

The brothers were quiet, each at opposite ends of the table. Aurora drummed her fingers against the wood in a practiced sort of way, defusing tension as best she knew how. 

“Why’s this chief inspector been sent to Birmingham?” his mother asked. Her gaze was as intense as ever, like she was picking him open piece by piece. 

“Communism, I reckon,” Ronan said, calm, still. He watched Declan pull a flask from inside his jacket, tugged on it aggressively. Opal shifted uncomfortably. Ronan’s eyes flicked to her. “There have been the strikes. The papers are talking about sedition.”

The lie came easily. There had once been a time when Ronan couldn’t imagine lying, especially not to his family. That had been before the war. That had been before he died there.

“And he’ll leave us alone, this copper?” This was Aurora again. Ronan noted the slight change in the pitch of her voice, as if she was trying to conceal her worry. 

“There are Catholic Irishman who came to Birmingham to get away from him,” Ronan shrugged, feigning indifference.

“We ain’t IRA,” Gansey protested. “We bloody fought for the king.”

Ronan admired Gansey’s passion, even if it made him sound like an idiot. There was a time Ronan might have followed Gansey into battle. That was before Ronan grew up. 

“Besides,” Gansey continued, “we’re Peaky Blinders. We aren’t afraid of no coppers. We’ll cut ‘em each a smile if they come after us.”

“That’s right,” Declan agreed. 

Ronan looked between the two of them, tried not to hate the men they’d all become. 

“Is that it, then?” he asked, finally, itching to escape this room, the heat of it, the lies, swirling and toxic, and everything else he was feeling, the sudden sweep of panic that threatened to knock him off his feet.

“Well, mum?” Declan looked at her.

Aurora hesitated, picked up a discarded cigarette from the ashtray in front of her. “We do everything in this family open,” she said. She turned her head to Ronan, slow slow slow, eyes ever watchful. “Is there anything else you’d like to say to this meeting, Ronan?”

He shook his head, meeting her eyes for the first time. “No,” he said. “Nothing that’s women’s business.”

“This whole bloody enterprise was women’s business when you boys were off in the war.” Her eyes were aglow with the the fire from the hearth. Ronan loved and feared her, and yet his heart felt as frozen as the snow he almost died in.

—

For all the show he made at family meeting at not knowing much else about the copper from Belfast, Ronan knew he’d have to talk to his mother eventually.

Eventually happened to be later that same night.

St. Agnes was tucked away between a rundown boarding house on one side and a large, empty lot on the other. She was there, in the second pew, head shawled and bent in silent prayer, when he arrived. He hesitated at the back of the church, watched the the slight line of her back, the way the shadows from the candle light crept across the walls, into the vaulted ceilings. 

She must have heard the door close, because she looked over her shoulder at him. 

He went to her, sat in the pew behind her. “I have ten minutes. What do you want?”

“I know when you’re keeping something from me,” she said, face turned towards the alter again. She was running a rosary through her thin fingers.

He could only just make out her profile, the sharp, unforgiving lines of it. Her blond hair looked muddy in the light, but her eyes shown as bright as ever. Ronan could just see her beauty of old hovering beneath wrinkles and the worry. He wondered if she missed her youth as much as he missed his.

She sat back, then, tucked her rosary back into its little velvet bag. “People talk. Some of them work at Monmouth. There have been detectives down at the proofing bays.” She looked at him. In the murky darkness, she was an intimidating creature. “Nothing happens in that factory without you knowing about it. Speak.”

Ronan was looking at the altar now. Jesus hung from his cross, destitute and pitiful and free, he thought. _How unfair._

“It was supposed to be four motorcycles,” he said, at long last, and a weight wiggled itself free from his chest. “My men must have been drunk. Confused the proofing bay for the export docks.”

He was whispering, as if speaking soft enough might trick God into turning a deaf ear. 

“They picked up the wrong fucking crate,” he breathed. “Inside there were twenty five Lewis machine guns, ten thousand rounds of ammunitions, fifty semi-automatic rifles, 200 pistols with shells. All bound of Libya.”

Aurora crossed herself. Ronan felt this was both an fitting and futile show of devotion. 

“Tell me you threw them in the cut,” she demanded. For whatever reason Ronan couldn’t look at her. 

“We put them in the stables to keep them out of the rain.” 

A long, pregnant moment hovered between them. The church was utterly still. Ronan’s eyes flicked to the crucifix above the alter and he wondered, not for the first time, if he was bound for hell or if he was already living in it.

But then Aurora turned in her pew and hit him, once, twice, a third time, again and again. Ronan threw up his arms, held her wrists still. 

“So that’s why they sent that copper from Belfast!” she spat. Her spittle landed uncomfortably on his cheek. Her eyes were bright and unavoidable. 

“Maybe,” he consented softly. “Maybe not.”

“I didn’t raise you a fool, Ronan Lynch,” she breathed. “You sell those guns to anyone with use for them and you will hang.”

He cast his eyes down. She was right. Of course she was. But it didn’t matter if she was right. Not anymore. 

“Dump them tonight. Somewhere the police can find them.”

“No.” Her breath hitched. He shook his head. “No. Not under the full moon. Three days until it wanes.”

He’d say anything, just now, anything, to get her out of his hair, out of this church. The guns were going nowhere, not under his watch. 

“You have my common sense,” she said, finally, “but your father’s devilment. I see them fighting. Don’t let him win.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just wanted to impart a quick note~
> 
> i'm attempting to keep this as historically accurate as possible. as such, there will be occasional sentiments & prejudices reminiscent of the times (this will only be kept if important to character development & plot...never for ornamentation). that being said, one reality i'm doing away with the heteronormativity in terms of relationships...i hope this doesn't bother anyone, but please feel free to drop me a line if you want to chat more about it!
> 
> i'll be sure to tag anything at the top of the chapters if i think it needs to be tagged, but please realize moving forward there could be potential elements that can trigger. again, will certainly tag as much as i can!
> 
> hope you enjoy<3

_I wish I was in Carrickfergus, only for nights in Ballygrand_  
_I would swim over the deepest ocean, only for nights in Ballygrand_  
_But the sea is wide and I cannot swim over and neither have I the wings to fly_  
_I wish I had a handsome boatsman to ferry me over my love and I_  
  
Carrickfergus

—

He had never been outside of Ireland before now. He expected something…different, perhaps. Something less familiar. But the streets were just as small and crowded and filthy and the people were just as withered and hunched and harrowed.

The accents were different, of course, but not by much. _This is an Irish neighborhood,_ he reminded himself. _Catholic_ , because that’s a distinction between life and death in these parts, just like at home.

The war, he realized, shifting himself through the tiny lanes, past the curious and sometimes hostile faces, reached across endless borders, killed some essential part in everyone. There was something missing in the faces of those who lived on these streets, like something vital had flickered and spluttered into nothing.

Adam Parrish always felt less than whole, and thusly felt a sort of kinship with these unkind faces of Small Heath. He knew hardship as they knew hardship. It was in his blood as much as theirs. And yet, they did not trust him. He could see it in their tiny, piercing glares, the way they avoided him, gawked at his fresh clothing, clean shoes and hair. 

How could he blame them? He was a stranger here. He was a stranger everywhere.

Adam stopped in front of a dingy looking pub and pulled a small, crumpled piece of newspaper from his breast pocket. He checked the name and address against the advertisement. 

_The Garrison._

It was just past ten in the morning. Adam tried the door. Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly for parts like these, there was no resistance. He pushed inside. 

“Hello?” he called, closing the door behind him quietly.

The pub was empty, though well lit, yellow and stark and welcoming.

“Hello?” he called again. A man peeked his head from a room behind the bar. He was middle aged, though his hair was nearly half grey already.

“We ain’t open, come back after midday.” He made to disappear again.

“I’ve come about the job,” Adam supplied hastily, stepping further into the room. 

The man took a long, withering look at his appearance, hyper focused on the fresh pressed line of his slacks, the neat tuck of his hair. “Position’s been filled.”

“It was printed yesterday,” Adam insisted.

The man stepped into the room properly. He was wiping a glass. “You know about this place?”

Adam paused. He didn’t really think it best to divulge exactly how much he knew about The Garrison pub of Watery Lane. He hoped his silence might be taken for deference. 

“Job’s been filled,” the man said again, turned towards the back room again.

“You’re lying,” Adam prompted. 

The man stopped in the door. His shoulders were tense, horribly so. “I’m doing you a favor.”

Adam stepped closer. Subconsciously he knew he was winning this fight, and yet the thought of anyone doing him a favor bit at him like a rabid dog. “I’m not asking for favors,” he ground out. “I’m asking for employment.”

“You’re too pretty,” the proprietor said, at long last, turning to face Adam again, setting his glass atop the bar. “They’d have you up against a wall.”

This insinuation was repulsive. Adam’s face heated measurably. Maybe he wasn’t winning this fight after all. “I have experience.” He tried parsing out his words, slowly, so he might now snap at this man who seemed to think him no better than a whore. “And references.” He needed this job, and needed was perhaps too soft a word for how desperately important it was he secure _this_ job specifically.

He allowed himself the momentary distraction of imagining Barrington’s face if he arrived at their designated meet within the next week without any advancement by way of contact with the Peaky Blinders. The first order of business was landing this job. Whelk had assured Adam that the proprietor would be of no issue to him; according to the inspector, this man was undereducated, a drunk, and a widower. Adam felt, not for the first time in his short career as an Agent of the Crown, that Barrington Whelk’s prejudices clouded his judgement. This man, for what it was worth, seemed hardened by time and toil, and no one looking the likes of Adam Parrish, in his posh clothing with his posh accent, would change his mind.

“Position’s filled, you’re too pretty, whatever’s easier to take, lad,” the man said. And he was smirking. Adam’s blood boiled. This was not nearly going to plan He cursed Whelk for sending him in largely unprepared for the pushback he was receiving.

Adam realized he wasn’t going to impress this skeptical barman with papers of references and lists of past employment. If he wanted this job, he’d have to prove himself, just like he’d always done. 

Scoffing, Adam turned and grabbed the nearest spittoon and walked it to a bucket at the back of the pub. As he did so, he sang.

_My childhood days bring back sad reflections_  
_Of happy times there spent so long ago_  
_My boyhood friends and my own relations_  
_Have all past on now with the melting snow_  


He continued around the pub, clearing the spittoons, letting his voice lilt and carry through the open rafters of the ceiling above. The proprietor, as Adam had come to think of the man, stood dumbfounded and transfixed by the bar.

Adam knew his voice was strong. It was familiar, too, of days when everyone sang, days before the war, before the songs changed to carnage and loss. Adam knew the old songs, and he knew how to make people feel.

Finally, he dropped the last spittoon back on the ground and handed the bucket over to the the bar owner.

“My singing used to make them cry and stop their fighting back in Ireland,” he offered, not modestly. When the man didn’t seem to have anything to add, Adam continued, perhaps a bit too sharply for someone looking for a job, “And I can take care of myself, thank you.”

They stood staring at each other in the midmorning haze. Adam’s heart beat traitorously in his chest.

Finally, the man held out his hand. “Call me Harry,” he said, and Adam took the offered hand with a triumphant smile. “I hope you know a lot of songs.”

—

Adam grossly underestimated The Garrison and her subsequent clientele. Harry had him start that very day, and by two in the afternoon the pub was filled with a rowdy crowd of Irish, their words twisting from English to Gaelic and back again. Adam felt a pang below his ribcage, the brogues thick and comfortable. The faces were blurs, and yet the atmosphere rang with home.

Not that Adam ever considered Belfast his home, not truly. He felt tied to the land, as any respecting Irishman would, but he was a solitary creature without family worth writing home to. His family was anonymity. His family was here, now, the sweet ebb of the familiar, the details that washed into nothing until it was just him, Adam, and the feeling of belonging without actually belonging anywhere.

The Garrison pub was by no means large, but the bodies were endless, pressed aggressively towards the length of the bar, all shouting for pints and for whiskey.

The room was foggy with smoke and noise and laughter. It was chaotic, restless. Adam’s feet were starting to hurt from how quickly he moved to pull pint after pint, clear glasses and ash trays and spittoons, only to have to do it all over again as another wave of people pushed their way into the pub.

“It is always so busy during the day?” Adam asked as he passed Harry to pull a bucket of dark lager. He handed it over, sloshing, to a group of boys who looked half Adam’s age. 

“No, they’re on their way up to St. Andrews! It’s opening day! Football!” Harry pointed over the many heads. “That’s the front line over there, and there’s the goalie, believe it or not.”

Adam found himself laughing, despite himself, and pulled another pint. 

From the far end of the bar, someone shouted at him over the din. “Hello!”

Adam swiveled his head towards the noise and saw a set of small shutters open in the wall, which looked into a large, private snug. A man stood in the snug, on the other side of the shutters, head down as he looked in his wallet. 

Adam moved to him, slowly, cautiously. The man looked up then, and Adam stopped in his tracks.

He was wearing a peaked flat cap down over his eyes, which were deep set and startlingly blue. The man blinked once, twice, let his eyes flick from Adam’s feet back to his face. Then he swallowed and his cheeks flutters obscenely. 

He was ever so pale, Adam realized, which was a silly thing to note, of all things, of all times, and yet it was impossible to ignore the traces of veins in the curve of his neck, the deep shadows that covered the hollows of his freckled cheeks, the downward cast of his eyes. Adam knew, suddenly, that he was looking at someone very important. Despite his paleness, his thinness, his presence demanded attention. The hair on the back of Adam’s neck stood on end. _Dangerous_ , his mind supplied, unhelpfully. 

“I need a bottle of rum,” the man said, at long last. His voice was gravelly and sharp all at once.

“A full bottle?”

“Yes.”

“Whatever it is, Adam,” Harry said, suddenly at his ear, “it’s on the house.”

Adam nodded, unable to look away from the man standing in the snug. “Dark or light?”

“Don’t care.”

Adam did turn, then, and pulled a bottle of dark rum from the shelf behind the bar. He placed it on the small counter between the shutters. “Harry said it’s on the house.”

The man slid a bill across the counter anyway, wrapped his hand around the neck of the rum bottle. He didn’t close the shutters, just stared at Adam from below that cap of his, down the long line of his nose. Adam’s skin prickled at the attention. He wanted to step back.

Then, the man licked his lips. “Are you a whore?”

Adam’s face immediately flooded red. The prickling on his skin sparked into fire. He never wanted to run from another person as much as he did right then.

“If not,” the man continued, appraising, “you’re in the wrong place.” He turned. Adam glared at his back, the conceited line of it, before he swiped the money off the counter and slammed the shutters closed.

He stood there a long while, face nearly pressed against the shutters. He felt…numb.

It had been a long while since Adam Parrish felt as utterly useless as that man made him feel. He was familiar with _useless_ , of course, wore it like a second skin, but it didn’t hurt any less for another human to recognize that trait in him, too, to remind him of it so cruelly. 

“Adam?” Harry probed at his side. Adam couldn’t bear to face him, or open his eyes, or move.

“Is that one of the ones you warned me about?” Adam asked. He was quiet and desperate. His stomach surged, flipped, soured. 

“Adam,” Harry was much closer now, urgent. “If I tell you something’s on the house, say nothing to whoever your serving. You gotta be careful.”

Adam nodded. He should have expected, really. He chose to walk into the belly of the beast, and he needed to be prepared for what found him here.

“If they decide they want you,” Harry went on. “There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

Adam’s eyes flew open. He peered up at Harry’s urgent, yet sympathetic face. “That’s ridiculous,” Adam said, though somewhere in the deep recess of his mind, Adam knew it wasn’t ridiculous at all. He only barely suppressed a shiver.

“Lucky for you,” Harry said as he started moving away, obviously uncomfortable at the conversation, “ever since he got back from France, Ronan doesn’t want anybody at all.”

_Ronan_ , Adam thought, looking back at the closed shutters to the snug. _Ronan Lynch._

—

“Where is he?” Ronan’s voice was low, but he might as well have shouted. The room fell still as he stomped in, shoved the bottle of rum towards Opal.

“Keep your voice down,” she chided him.

Ronan surveyed the room. 

Gansey stood in the doors between the dining room and the betting den. He had that far away look in his eye that Ronan had come to know as contempt at being lied to. Aurora sat at the table with Opal, steadily bandaging Declan’s broken fingers, one by one. She flicked her eyes to him, something silent and withering in her eyes. Declan hissed from next to her, a long, unforgiving stream of curses. 

Declan, when Ronan’s eyes finally landed on him, was bloody and bruised, thick streams of red washed from his temples and forehead down over his face and onto his neck and shirt. He hissed again, a low, guttural, “Fuuuuck!” as Opal tied a the bandage on his thumb. 

Ronan swallowed, grabbed a cloth from the basin on the table, and rang it out. “Give it here,” he ordered to Opal, who uncorked the rum and sloshed it over the wet rag. Ronan stepped up to Declan, used his free hand to push up the strands of his hair. Along the seam of Declan’s forehead and hairline was a deep, festering slice of red, split neatly where a set of knuckles made contact with his face. 

“Hold still,” he mumbled, and Declan braced himself. Ronan pressed the rum soaked rag to his face, the cut, and Declan swore again. Ronan repeated the process, over and over, until he could be sure the cuts were clean. 

He stood back. Declan’s face was still painted red and he groaned every so often at the work being done on his hand. Ronan just looked at him. Declan looked back.

“It was that copper,” Gansey said from his place by the door. “The one from Belfast.”

“Name’s Whelk.” Declan’s voice was a nothing thing, barely there. “There’s been a robbery.”

Ronan stepped back farther, backed into a dresser against the opposite wall. 

“He said Mr. Churchill sent him specifically,” Declan continued, voice horribly slow, horribly unhinged. “He said he wanted our help.”

“We don’t help coppers,” Gansey chirped from the door. Ronan flicked him an appreciate look, then focused on Declan again. 

There was something unspoken between them—Declan, bloodied and worn and slumped onto a rickety chair, and Ronan, tall and severe and far, far away, backed against a wall. He could sense the wavering in Declan’s stance, as it always had at the smallest implication of trouble. _Retreat_ his shoulders said. _Fall back._

Ronan hated retreating. It was a sign of acute weakness to fold one’s self into the fetal position, to run from a fight, wait for the first and final punch. Ronan knew that Declan was small time, and now this copper did too. He could imagine in great detail how pathetic his brother looked as a group of patrol men pounded at his face. What had Declan revealed to them? What had he promised?

“He knew all about our war records,” Declan pressed, attempting to sit straighter in his chair and failing. “Called us patriots.”

Gansey tittered irritably. Even Aurora frowned at her eldest son.

“Shut up and listen, all of you!” Declan shouted—he was belligerent, Ronan knew it like the back of his own hand. “He wants us to be his eyes and ears. I told him we’d have a meeting. Take a vote.”

The last line he said directly at Ronan. He said it was a force that left little room for dissent. 

Unlucky for Declan, Ronan was a master at digging himself out of impossible situations. He’d been a tunneler in France, after all. 

And so Ronan said nothing, just stared, unblinking, a challenge so clear he saw it rattle through his older brother like a storm.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Declan breathed, harsh and disbelieving. He looked around the room, aghast, when Gansey and Opal avoided making eye contact with him. Only Aurora meet Declan’s gaze head on. “What the fuck is wrong with him lately?” he asked her. She shook her head, once, almost imperceptibly.

“The police work for us,” Ronan stated, a brilliant and startling reminder into the tense silence in the room. Declan’s head slowly turned back to him. His muteness was enough of an assent for Ronan. He knew Declan would keep his mouth shut, under threat of his place in the family. 

“Finish cleaning him up,” Ronan waved his hand at the rum. Opal took up his place with the rag and methodically scrubbed the dried blood from her oldest brother’s face.

Ronan pulled his cap over his eyes and stalked from the room.

He knew Gansey followed him, heard the footsteps shadowing him from behind as he made his way up the skinny, creaking stairs. At the top, Ronan hesitated at his bedroom door, waited for Gansey’s presence, the certain force of it. 

“What?” Ronan snapped, when he was sure it was just the two of them in the hall.

Gansey shifted from foot to foot. The hallway was dark and shadowed. Gansey was nothing but a blue mass in the gloom.

“What are you up to?” Gansey asked, tentative in their solitude. 

“Stay out of it,” Ronan snarled. “And keep your head down.”

“I’m with you, Ronan, you know I am,” he pressed. Ronan heard the unsaid _but…_. It was a festering truth that slid into most of his relationships at some point.

Ronan spun on his heel. He was nose to nose with the man he’d come to call his brother. “What is it, Gansey?” His voice was teetering on a ledge. “Don’t you trust me?”

“Of course,” Gansey was quick to assure him. Ronan wondered, wildly, how long it was since they truly talked. Months, perhaps. Maybe even years.

Ronan forced himself to breathe, slow and steady, in through the nose, out through the mouth, forced his tone to something more placid, entreating. “I’ve got it under control. I just need you to trust me.” 

Not quite a lie, but close to it. Then again, Ronan was a liar these days. He was starting to think he always had been.

“I trust you,” Gansey said, at long last. Ronan believed him. Gansey wasn’t the liar.

When Gansey was gone, and it was just Ronan in his room, door shut and locked, he pulled a small case from under his mattress. 

The pipe inside was long and slender, a delicate ceramic bowl at the end. Ronan open a small case, poked out a single black bud, and held it over the glowing fire of the opium lamp until it became malleable. He then placed the bud into the bowl and laid down, one end of the pipe on his mouth, the other flickering closer and closer to the flame.

The vapor sparked to life in the pipe, filter through the long arm, and into his lungs. 

Ronan pulled the pipe away from his mouth, clattered it onto the bedside table, and collapsed, loose limbed and numb, across his tiny bed.

He exhaled.

The room flickered pleasantly. In and out of focus. Orange glow. Dancing shadows. Somewhere, someone pulled a chair from under a table. The sound scratched across floorboards. It continued scratching, endless and onward, until it wasn’t actually scratching, put tapping, _tap, tap, tap_ , the dull clink of hammer to wood.

The room ebbed around him again, in and out, in and out, until it wasn’t actually a room, just a tunnel, one long, endless patch of dirt in every direction. A single oil lamp hung overhead. Someone breathed near him, shallow and sick.

Ronan watched the far end of the tunnel, a tall wall of dirt. The tapping continued. Henry breathed ragged by his ear. But then it wasn’t Henry by his ear; it was Steve, groaning and panting, but no, it was the German, arm wrapped around Ronan’s neck, crushing and crushing and he couldn’t breath. He was sinking, drowning, dirt caked up and shoved into his mouth, down his throat, until his lungs were full of it.

“Henry!” someone yelled. It was Ronan. Ronan yelled again. “Henry!” But it wasn’t a yell anymore—a whimper, as he faded, faded. An explosion rang above them, meters above, in the open air. _Henry_.

Steve screamed, panted, pulled at Ronan’s arm, and there it was, air air air _at last_ he sat up, gasping…gasping…

The tunnel flickered. It was just his room. No, it was the tunnel. No, just the room. 

He panted, looked at the wall at the end of his bed. The floral wall paper peeled back. He forced himself to focus on it, count the petals on the flowers. He could still hear the screaming. He could still hear the hammer _tap tap tap_.

He wanted to die.

—

The Garrison, Adam was finding, could be particularly pleasant, if you knew how to placate the vain posturing and drooping wills of tired men. They were sad, mostly, lacking both ambition and tranquility in their daily lives. They wore their work on their skin, in their hair, on the very tongue with which they spoke. It was the ale and the whiskey that calmed their nerves, mostly, but when that ran it’s course, it was their stories and the comfort of familiar faces.

It was a Saturday night, nearly a week since he first started. They knew his face by now, and some even knew his name. There were the cheeky bastards who tried their hand with him, either grabbing him when he walked past with his bucket and mop, or trying to grab him when he left the pub late at night. They were drunk, mostly, easy to shove off, to poke back towards their homes and the wives that waited for them there. Then there were the old men, those who’d seen more wars and troubles then their sons and their son’s sons. They told their stories loudly and with pride. There were women, too, strong women from the factories, and the pretty types looking for a night of warmth in a man’s bed. 

Adam came to recognize them, crave them. 

Logically he knew this was just a place for him to be, a station from which he was to watch and observe and collect information, and yet it felt important to come to know these patrons, to comfort them in the only way he knew how. With song.

He stood on the seat of a wooden chair. They crowded around him, eager faces, full pints. Even Harry stopped his cleaning to listen when Adam sang.

_I’m a young lad, and have just come over,_  
_Over from the country where they do things big,_  
_And among the boys I’ve got myself a lover,_  
_And since I’ve got a lover, why, I don’t care a fig_  


They knew this song, as Adam knew they would, and they joined him, pints raised, arms slung over their neighbors shoulders.

_The boy I love is up in the gallery_  
_The boy I love is looking now at me,_  
_There he is, can’t you see, waving his handkerchief,_  
_As merry as a robin that sings on a tree._  


The door to the pub banged open. Some heads turned to it at first, then many, and that’s when the voices tapered off, a sudden shunting of silence, bodies turning from the door, heads pressed meekly over their pints. Adam’s face flickered, joy seeping from him, as he saw who stepped into the pub, calculated and commanding, but his voice never wavered as he finished his song.

_Now, If I were a Duchess and had a lot of money,_  
_I'd give it to the boy that's going to marry me._  
_But I haven't got a penny, so we'll live on love and kisses,_  
_And be just as happy as the birds on the tree._  


Ronan Lynch folded his arms behind his back, turned his head up and watched Adam with a face so placid it was like he wasn’t there at all. But Adam saw it, in the eyes, the flickering smolder of life, hidden and dormant and wondrous. Adam had never seen a man so menacing.

When Adam finished singing, the pub was an eerie quiet. Ronan Lynch kept his eyes focused and unblinking on Adam up on his chair. Adam could hardly bring himself to breath.

“We haven’t had singing in here since the war,” Harry said from somewhere near Ronan’s left. Adam watched Ronan blink, then, gradual and steady, before his eyes slid to where Harry stood, hunched and deferential. 

The room was horribly small, all of a sudden, a certain wrath rolling off Ronan in waves. Harry sensed the ire immediately, stepped back, stepped back again. 

Ronan blinked. “And why is that, Harry?” he asked, no louder than a whisper. 

There was a threat in those words, laced with poison, mutinous and sure. Harry nodded profusely, apologized, continued backing away. Ronan didn’t blink again, didn’t look at Adam again, just wrenched his way into the snug and slammed the door. 

Adam stumbled from the chair. His knees shook. What was this place, this simmering hell in the rotting pit of the world? And who, who the bloody hell did Ronan Lynch think he was?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for those who don't know what a snug is, and are ridiculously interested in random bits of info like i am, check out this [great article](http://mentalfloss.com/article/93409/brief-history-irish-snug) on traditional Irish snugs. The snug in this story has private access to the bar via small shutters/little doors. 
> 
> unbeta'd. sorry if it's a mess! would love to hear your thoughts! on [tumblr](https://onthesea-mystery.tumblr.com/)!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: there is fighting/blood in this chapter, though i'd say it's pretty mild. also one use of a derogatory term towards the Lynch brothers.

_Now we're a family, and we're alright now_  
_We got money, and a little place to fight now_  
_We don't know you, and we don't owe you_  
_But if you see us around, I got something else to show you_  
  
The Hardest Button to Button — The White Stripes

—

It was a beautiful museum.

Adam always had an appreciation for beautiful things, especially those things with beauty amidst the muck and grime of the seedy world that surrounded it. The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery sat in the heart of the city. Destitution wept and heaved in the streets that encircled it, the very streets that Adam now called his home.

Perhaps his appreciation stemmed from his own desire to shed what mire hung off him still, even now, in the grey hopelessness of Small Heath, to cleanse whatever wretched, crooked soul that held for dear life inside of him. 

The museum’s Round Room in particular caught his eye. He sat on one of the empty benches, watched the people shuffle through with their programs, pausing here and there to admire the works mounted to the walls. 

The dome overhead was a prism of glass, swathing the entirety of the room in grand, warm afternoon light. 

Adam closed his eyes, let the warmth kiss him, sooth him. He could stay here forever, he thought, deliriously. How he craved a life where he could come to museums for his own enjoyment, a life where he could go wherever he pleased. How simple he would live, if only the world worked that way.

But the world was not simple, or kind. He knew first hand the horrors the world served up to the likes Adam Parrish. And yet, just now, the sun seeping into his tired limbs, the dull thrum of voices and footsteps around him, he thought he might like it, a simple life, if only…

“Are you in position?” A voice came from behind him.

Adam slowly opened his eyes. “I am, sir.”

Chief Inspector Barrington Whelk sat down on the bench next to him, facing the opposite direction, and opened a pamphlet on his lap, pursued it with curiosity. They were not to be seen together, or appear to know one another. Adam was undercover, after all. 

“Do you have a report?” Mr. Whelk asked him.

“No sir,” Adam crossed one leg over the other, furrowed his brow as if he was inspecting the triptych along the opposite wall. “Only that I’m amazed at the way these people live.”

What he didn’t say was how he wished he could help them, somehow unload their burdens, lessen their troubles, put food into their bellies.

Mr. Whelk _hmm_ ed thoughtfully, flipped over a page in his pamphlet. 

Adam shifted uncomfortably. “Do you have any information that might help me, sir?”

Adam sensed Mr. Whelk’s discomfort, though from what it was hard to discern. He was often prickly, especially on cases such as this, especially when Adam was involved. 

“None as of yet,” Mr. Whelk murmured. “We interrogated the leader of the Peaky Blinders, but learned nothing. He’s a brute, an idiot. Nothing more.”

It was Adam’s turn to hum thoughtfully. He sat straighter under the weight of his knowledge. “It’s my impression that Declan doesn’t lead the Lynch family,” he supplied. “It’s the younger brother, Ronan.”

Mr. Whelk remained silent, but it did not escape Adam’s notice how he too sat straighter. 

“They say,” Adam pressed, tapping two fingers against his knee, “that Ronan Lynch won two medals for gallantry during the war.”

“Is that fascination I hear?”

“Hardly,” Adam bristled. He uncrossed his leg, then crossed it again. 

Mr. Whelk _hmm_ ed again.

“My assumption hasn’t changed,” Adam continued, schooling both his features and voice, which had suddenly run away from him. “The communists are too disorganized to plan something like this, and the bookmakers have other business.”

“Yes, yes, I know very well your feelings towards the Fenians.” Mr. Whelk’s voice lofted in that highly aristocratic way it often did. 

Adam felt his ears go pink. “My personal feelings towards the IRA are immaterial.”

Mr. Whelk slapped his program shut and placed it on the bench between them. “If you see any guns,” he murmured, repositioning his hat onto his head, “check them against the serial numbers on the slip of paper in this program.”

Adam slid the program towards himself, tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket. Mr. Whelk stood.

“Adam,” he said, voice far kinder than he had been moments ago. “You’re father. He’s long dead. It would do you good to find peace.”

Adam’s hand balled into a fist and squeezed. His father had nothing to do with this. Nothing.

But Mr. Whelk was gone, and it was Adam alone beneath the vaulted glass dome. His eyes fell closed again, but he was no longer in touch with whatever serenity from before. He thought of guns and gangs and a certain blue eyed man.

—

Ronan’s cigarette hung lopsided from the crook of his mouth. He had the paper open in front of him, business as usual, and the books stacked neatly on the edge of his desk.

It was quiet in the den, the calm before the storm. 

Outside the church bells chimed 4 in the afternoon. They had an hour, maybe two hours, until shift change at the factories, until the bodies moved en-masse to their doors, the men to lay bets with their days earnings and the women to stop them before it happened. 

A door clattered opened somewhere nearby and a voice stuck brutally through the calm.

“Where is he?” Declan shouted. His voice shook in a way that said Declan had, of course, been drinking. “Where is he? Ronan!”

Declan rounded the corner. His face was red, swollen, neck bright and thick where his collar was buttoned to the top, choking him. 

Ronan pulled away from the paper and the books, let his hands drag along the length of the desk, and appraised his older brother. “What is it this time?”

Declan slammed an exact copy of the daily paper in front of Ronan’s nose. “He fucking won,” he spat. “Monaghan Boy bloody won.”

“Of course he won,” Ronan consented, pulling the fag from between his lips.

“Are we fixing races now, Ronan?”

Ronan let out a long stream of smoke in the air, purposefully into his brother’s face. It was satisfying, watching Declan’s face steep redder.

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Declan was practically growling now. Their men looked on, but ultimately knew to avoid the pair of them when Declan got like this. “Kempton is Kavinsky’s track. Did you get permission from him?”

No, Ronan hadn’t gotten permission from anyone. “Fuck Kavinksy,” he put the cigarette back in his mouth. He leaned forward, shoulders spread wide, hands on the desk. He was nearly nose to nose with his brother. “Yes, the horse bloody won, Declan. And when we do the powder trick again, they’ll come in droves to lay their bets. And he’ll win again. And then it’ll be more than The Garrison betting on him. It’ll be the whole of Small Heath. Then, and only then, will the horse lose.”

He breathed out another stream of spiraling smoke. Declan waved it away from his face, spluttering. 

“Do you understand, brother?” Ronan asked, a whisper thick with smoke and promise and the threat of danger. “Fuck Kavinksy and fuck his track. The Blinders do what they want.”

He might as well have said _The Blinders do what I want._

Declan appraised him through the haze of smoke and his fury, but eventually slumped in the chair opposite Ronan, as if all the fight had fled him, as if his drunkenness was finally catching up to him.

“Where’s Gansey?” Ronan asked.

“How should I know?” Declan slurred, unbuttoning the top button of his shirt.

“Find him,” Ronan said, stamping his fag out on the desk. “We’ve gotta see a man about another horse.”

—

The Sargent compound was on the outskirts of Birmingham, on those quiet untrod tracks of land where hills divvied and cut through canals, where trees were sparse and undecorated, dead brown bark curling and falling into yellow grass. The sky was grey and endless here, the long trains of caravans the only spark of color for miles and miles.

“The fucking Sargent’s, Ronan?” Declan slammed the door on the car. 

Ronan chanced a look at Gansey. He looked as apprehensive as Declan sounded. 

“They’re family,” Ronan said. He threw his cigarette into the dirt. Stomped on it. “Technically.”

“Who cares if they’re family? This is bad news, look at them,” Declan pressed close behind him. So did Gansey. Their stances were predatory, ringing with the heat of unleashed brawls. 

His met their apprehension with silence, scanning the busy, crowded encampment. They were safe here, for now, as long as Calla kept her promise. 

The momentary truce between the Lynch and Sargent clans was flimsy indeed—there were whispers as they wove through the wagons, and other things, too, curses in that familiar Romani, curses in Gaelic, rocks kicked at their feet as they passed, spit hurled at their turned backs.

Declan was a growling beast at his side, Gansey a live-wire, hopping from foot to foot, eyes scanning, searching for _any_ provocation whatsoever.

“If it ain’t Ronan bloody Lynch!” The voice was amused.

Ronan stopped and turned, held his hand out to Calla Lily. 

“I thought you said we were meeting a man,” Declan snarled at his side, sizing Calla from head to toe.

“Did you now?” Calla gave Ronan an amused look, tucked her hands into her trouser pockets.

“You said you had a horse to show me.” Ronan mimicked her posture, shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his coat, tossed his shoulders back, and watched her from the length of his nose. 

Calla snapped twice in quick succession. From around a cobalt wagon painted with golden stars came a beautiful mare, on top of which was a boy, riding bareback. 

“Oi!” Calla yelled, waved her arms at the lad. “Get off her, you demon!” 

The boy jumped down and ran through the camp, shrieking with joy. The horse stood calm and expectant, sniffed the air once, then again.

Ronan walked to the horse, laid a hand on her nose. “There, there,” he murmured against it’s warm flesh. It whinnied. Ronan smiled, pressed it into the white grey of her mane. 

“So this is the horse,” he said, looking over his shoulder to where Calla stood watching him.

“And that’s the car,” she tossed her chin out, back towards the dust covered Model T at the fringe of the camp. Ronan smirked.

“What’s she mean, _that’s the car?_ ” Gansey asked. 

Ronan smirked again, ran his hand over the flank of the horse, down her leg, pulling it up to inspect the shoe. 

“What’s she mean, Ronan?” Gansey tried again. Ronan dropped the horse’s leg, straightened, turned to his brothers.

Their backs were to the sun, capped heads rimmed with light. They were otherwise black shadows against the grey sky. 

“Hang on a fucking minute,” Declan stepped out of rank from Gansey, came closer and closer to where Ronan stood poised by the mare. “You aren’t swapping the family car for a bloody horse!”

“Of course we aren’t swapping it!” Calla cried out, kicking off the wagon where she was leaning. “That’d be mad!”

She came between Ronan and his brothers, dug around in her pocket until she found two large, yellow coins. She tossed one to Ronan.

“We’re gonna play two-up,” he said. Declan swore. Gansey tittered, but Ronan could sense the excitement. He could always count on Gansey for a bit of fun. 

Calla and Ronan lined up shoulder to shoulder, readied their coins on the tips of their thumbs. 

“Right,” Calla said. “Three, two, one…”

They flipped.

The coins twisted over in the air, again and again, then free fell into the dirt. They both bent over.

In the first, a pair of coins flipped on heads.

They straightened, spit in their hands, and shook. Ronan then dug the car keys from his pocket and handed them to Calla.

“You fucking idiot,” Declan cawed. “You lost us the fucking car!”

“Shut up, Declan,” Ronan rounded on him. “I won. I promised Calla a ride in the car if she lost.”

“Oh,” Declan faltered, blinking. “Right.”

Behind them, three men laughed uproariously. Ronan turned to them slowly. They were pointing at Declan. One of them said something in Romani, but were too far away for Ronan to hear. They laughed again.

“Oi, are you Sargent boys laughing at my brother?” his voice was pitched dangerously low. He took a step towards them. The laughter stopped. “Are yah?”

“Ronan, hey, enough,” Calla pulled on his shoulder, but he shrugged her off. Something was kicking to life in his gut. Maybe it was the open air after so long in the smog. Maybe it was the horse, it’s wild power, the way it seared into him, untamed and free. Or maybe he was just itching for a fight, just like Declan and Gansey had been the moment they arrived here. 

“I asked you a question,” Ronan demanded, another step closer. The Sargent boys, for their part, did not look intimidated. This only spurred Ronan’s sudden bloodlust. Declan may be an idiot, but no one laughed at the Lynch boys.

“Ronan, come on,” Calla was between them, suddenly, arms out. Her hair was loose and flying around her face. She looked disproportionately worried. Ronan stopped, if only out of respect for her, for that flimsy truce she stood for. 

When she was sure he wouldn’t proceed, she turned to the three men, and growled. “ _No bloodshed on the fairgrounds,_ ” she hissed in Romani. “ _His grandfather was a king. A king!_ ”

Ronan shoved his hands into his coat and presented a glorious glare to the three of them.

They began the back down, slowly, stepping back and away.

Except one. “Yeah,” he said, puffing out his chest. “But his mother’s a Didicoy whore.”

It was amazing how the grey sky ebbed into red, then. The sounds of the camp fizzled away, too, sudden static, sudden stillness.

Ronan’s cap came off in a flash. The razor blades stitched into the seam glistened in a sudden spike of sunlight.

Gansey and Declan were at his side, too, their caps off, slashing and slashing at the hunched men cowering in the earth. Blood rang out like a church bell, splashed across his face. Somewhere, a voice shrieked in agony. Somewhere else, Ronan was calm.

—

“Fuck those Sargent scum.” Declan pressed a cool rag to his split eyebrow bone. The stitches had come undone somewhere in the scuffling. Now blood was dripping slowly down his forehead, into his right eye. Gansey was also tinged red, lip cracked and purple, hair slick with both his blood and the blood of one of the Sargent boys.

Ronan’s head rang. 

“As much as I appreciate you fighting for my honor,” Aurora was uncharacteristically calm, “you do know what this means, don’t you boys?”

Ronan’s head rang louder. But he remained quiet. Maybe if he kept his eyes closed, tucked his chin into his chest a little further, she’d fade away into nothing. Maybe the whole room would disappear. Then he wouldn’t have to remember the slice of skin beneath his blade, the way the ear feel without protest, into hard packed dirt.

A hand slammed onto the table he sat at. It shook as though it might burst into pieces. “Ronan Lynch, you better look at me when I’m talking to you.”

_Ah,_ he thought. _There she is._

He looked at her. His head was still ringing. 

“Are you trying to start a war with the Sargents?” she breathed. 

He shook his head. “We weren’t trying to start anything.”

“They laughed at me!” Declan slurred from across the room, voice muffled behind his dirty rag.

“Oh, well thank the heavens,” she mocked, laughing derisively. “I’ve only got three cut up sons to look after now, but at least you weren’t _trying_ to start a war with the Sargents.”

“Mum,” Gansey panted, head between his hands. “I’ve got a banging headache. Could you please—?”

She slammed onto the table again. All three of them flinched back. “Do you have any idea what happened while you weren’t _trying_ to start a war?”

They were silent, but Ronan’s eyes flicked up. Aurora was looking at him. Intently.

“What happened?” he whispered.

“The coppers raided the communists.”

Ronan sat up. His pulse fluttered. “What?” 

“You heard me.” She stood up, lit a cigarette, and crossed her arms over her chest. “They turned over Midland lane, countless houses, and three pubs.”

“What the hell!” Gansey’s face was a murderous twist behind his hands. Ronan stood, swayed, unsteady still from their fight with the Sargents, the loss of blood, the beer he downed as soon as they got back to Birmingham.

“The coppers said the Blinders cleared out to the fairgrounds so they could do it,” Aurora continued, voice dripping malice. 

“Which pubs did they do?” Ronan asked quietly. He felt ill. Frozen in place.

“The Guns, The Chains, The Marquis,” Aurora took a long drag of her cigarette, met Ronan’s eye with a humorless smile. “All the ones that pay you to protect them. They didn’t touch The Garrison.”

So, this copper was smarter than he looked. 

Ronan plucked the cigarette from Aurora’s shaking fingers. 

This copper wanted it to look like a Peaky backed job, did he? 

Ronan pulled on the end of the cigarette, let the smoke fill him until he wanted to cough.

“Alright,” he said, at long last. “Cash to the landlords of the pubs. Get the veterans to clean up the mess.”

Gansey and Declan stood, Declan cursing, Gansey swaying. 

“Make sure they see your faces,” Aurora told them, tossing a bag of coins to Gansey as he moved from the room. 

Declan hesitated by Ronan’s shoulder. “Are you coming with us?” he asked, shrugging on his coat. 

Ronan breathed out a stream of smoke. “I have to stable the horse.” Aurora was watching him. He could feel her eyes on his back like a target. 

Declan nodded, tossed his chin out, as if some unasked question had been answered. Ronan’s brow furrowed. 

But Declan was gone, following Gansey. Aurora shut the door behind them, turned on Ronan.

Before she could get a word out, “Where’s Opal?”

Aurora was not expecting this. Her face crumpled, briefly, then righted itself, smoothed back over. “Don’t you worry about that.”

“Where is she, mum?”

Silence. Aurora was leaning against the closed door, hands behind her back. She smiled, a wicked thing for a once beautiful face. “I thought you didn’t care for women’s business.”

Ronan knew. Ronan always knew. Aurora knew he knew, and yet she wouldn’t say it. She didn’t need to say it, he guessed, but there would be something supremely satisfying in forcing his mother to admit that Opal was sleeping with Henry Cheng.

Just another knife to lodge in his back. Just another hole to puncture into his already failing heart.

They just watched each other, let the truth pass through them in silence. It was a steady, beating wave, and yet Ronan felt he never knew how to swim, not in the midst of this. He was afraid. Aurora must know that as well.

“She’s safe,” his mother said, finally. 

“Tell me where she is.”

“She’s safe. And you won’t go looking for her.”

He wouldn’t go looking for her. Not yet. 

Henry would be on the run by now, that was a given, hidden away in some filthy hole in London. That made the most sense, while things were so hot in Birmingham. Opal was most certainly still in the city limits, though. Aurora would have told him if otherwise. He’d find her. Eventually. Once everything calmed down again. He’d find Henry too, skin him alive, if he had to. 

“You must know what they were looking for.” His mother sat at the table, not before plucking her cigarette back from him. 

Yes, Ronan knew what Chief Inspector Campbell was looking for. It thrummed alive in him, kept him awake at night, furnished him with enough anxiety that he drank twice as much as usual. He was starting to feel like Declan, hands shaking and some part of him reaching out, uncontrollably, for anything to numb the quaking. 

“You didn’t dump them in the cut,” she accused. Ronan didn’t deny it. “He isn’t gonna stop until he gets those guns back, you mark my words.”

Ronan sat next to her. She passed him the cigarette. The smoke wrapped around them, bound them to the secrecy of this moment. 

“Will you talk to him?” she asked, quiet, calm.

“No,” Ronan said. “You don’t parlay when you’re on the back foot.”

Because they were. They’d be blamed for the destruction on Midland lane. They’d feel the repercussions for days to come, weeks. He’d be lucky if people weren’t spitting on his shoes as he walked past them. 

Whelk must know that. He must know a lot of things. Like Ronan being the true head of the Lynch family, for all Declan’s posturing suggesting otherwise. Like their success riding on the mood of the people, their undying support, their unwavering fear. If Small Heath felt the Peaky Blinders were tossing them out for the likes of a copper from Belfast then, well, there wouldn’t be any Peaky Blinders anymore, now would there?

He stubbed out the cigarette. Stood. Folded himself into his jacket. Aurora’s eyes were wide gems in the hazy room.

Ronan’s cheeks fluttered when he swallowed. “We’ll strike a blow back first.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unbeta'd. come join me on [tumblr](https://onthesea-mystery.tumblr.com/)!


	4. Chapter 4

_I see an omen in the sky_  
_A blood red moon shines on you and I_  
_And the raven calls, "Hey do you believe?"_  
_I do believe, I do believe, I do believe_  
  
Tethered To The Dark — Anya Marina

—

They burnt the King’s portraits on a Sunday.

The fire was a magnificent thing, one great orange blaze to illuminate the dank, shadowy crags of Watery Lane. 

The people pressed around the bonfire, faces hardened and wrinkled, flickering with anger and hate. The warmth was almost too much to bear, and yet these bodies were accustomed to the vibrant singe of fire to skin, having worked long in the factories. The burn was in their veins, passed from father to son, mother to daughter, their red pickled flesh a cross unborn.

The destruction at the hands of the police, the ransacking of their homes and properties, not to mention the unwarranted arrests of their husbands and sons was reason enough for these people to toss their photos of the King into the pulsing flames. The fact the Peaky Blinders paid them each a bob for their troubles made the decision less of a decision and more of an inevitable.

It was easy to call to order those under admittedly false scrutiny. To bribe them into treason? How willingly the petrified followed the strong into war. 

Ronan was a wraith in the lick of the flames.

He knew the people of Small Heath, the curl of their shoulders under the weight of their burdens, their hopeless existences. He knew their needs and he knew how to provide for them. He too once walked these streets afraid. He too cowered under the watchful eye of the King.

The war changed him, ripped his boyhood out, spat on it, cut it into tiny, indiscernible pieces. Ronan hardly recognized the faces surrounding him, as much as he knew them. Ronan hardly recognized himself.

Through the pulsing darkness, his eyes were a serpentine thing, hungry and watchful, consuming like the fire consumed, rippled and starved, paints melting and fizzling into dizzying grey smoke.

On a Sunday, his Majesty King George burned. On a Sunday, Ronan started a war.

—

There was no article the next day, not a single mention of the bonfire or the ashen remains of King George’s portraits still smoldering in the middle of Watery Lane. Ronan expected this.

It would have been lunacy for the Home Office to run a story of such blatant disloyalty to the Crown. If Ronan was a betting man (and he was), he’d bet the story was squashed sometime before dawn.

And yet, the streets hummed. 

Ronan slid money into the eager, waiting hand of a cop named Moss. 

“A wire came in from London at dawn,” Moss mumbled from the corner of his mouth. “Winston Churchill himself.” 

“And what did Mr. Churchill want with our Chief Inspector?” Ronan asked, slipping another wad of cash into Moss’s now empty hand. Moss took the money, tucked it into his pocket.

“Nearly skinned him two ways to Sunday,” Moss continued, “from what I heard. Something about not keeping you and your kind in check. Something about not making waves, not _getting into the papers._ ”

A pregnant moment. Ronan let it marinate, let the victory sink into his bloodstream.

“Burning the King’s pictures. Jesus, Lynch, you lost your mind?” Moss was looking at him like a Dad might look at a son. 

Ronan didn’t have a father. The look infuriated him.

“We’re war hero’s.” Ronan’s smirk was seeped in a long distilled malice. “Two medals for gallantry, myself. The King thinks he can send Chief Inspector Whelk to turn over our houses and our pubs without consequence?”

“He’s on a rampage this morning, Ronan.” He must have meant Whelk. That pleased Ronan to no end. Let him rage. Let Winston Churchill tear him limb from limb. Let him try to out think the Peaky Blinders again. Ronan wouldn’t stop at treason, next time. 

“You better watch yourself,” Moss continued. “He’s more dangerous than he looks.”

Ronan’s smile was a wicked thing. “Here’s to hoping.”

Ronan pushed past Moss, back into the early crush of the lane. Moss tipped his hat to him and melted into a dark alley.

The burning of the King’s portraits had been a calculated risk. His mother nearly skinned him alive when she heard the plan, but Ronan was a shrewd and unstoppable tidal wave. Destroying the likeness of the monarch aside, Ronan knew the boring twists of bureaucracy like the back of his hand—the war may have killed his boyhood, but it certainly prepared him for a much longer game, a game perforated with red tape and protocol and answering to the man positioned above you, never reaching too high, never _making waves._ The war’s one true lesson was memorizing the hand of the enemy; the police, the government, the King.

Of course Winston Churchill didn’t want the story of the portraits burning to make the news. Winston Churchill didn’t want to call attention to Chief Inspector Whelk being in Birmingham. Winston Churchill didn’t want to alert the gun robbers of Whelk’s position, his movements. Winston Churchill wanted discretion. And thus, Ronan and _his kind_ we safe.

It was all very boring. Ronan Lynch hated boring, but he loved winning. And he counted Chief Inspector Whelk’s dressing down at the behest of Winston Churchill a major success. 

Who was on the back foot now?

He turned through the curving streets, past The Garrison and the steel mills, the laundry and boarding houses, the shipyard, stables, and slums, until he was in the secluded part of the canals he often frequented as a child. It was quieter here, though it smelled perhaps twice as bad, the water a stagnant, reeking swill. But there was a track nearby, one Ronan used to sneak into when he was just a boy. If you listened hard enough, there might be the sound of hooves on dirt, the crack of a whip. 

There were memories in these twisting canal-ways, some of them good. 

He found Matthew there, bent at the hip inspecting the shoe of their newest horse, the one from the Sargent’s.

Matthew looked up as Ronan approached. His face, grubby with soot and dirt and sweat, broke into an innocent smile. He dropped the horse’s leg, wiped his hands on his soiled trousers.

“I had her out on the gallops,” Matthew said by way of hello. 

Ronan walked to him, grabbed his shoulder affectionately. “How’s she looking?”

“She’s strong,” Matthew said, ran his hand along her neck. “Lungs of an elephant.”

“And how’s she running?”

Matthew tilted his head noncommittally. “Nimble, mostly,” he murmured, considering. “But she bounces on the hard ground.”

Ronan joined Matthew by the horse’s left flank, touched his hand to her neck, breathed. He flicked his eyes to his younger brother, who was again inspecting her shoes, eyes squinted small in heavy concentration. 

It was Matthew alone who rivaled Ronan’s love for these creatures. They both learned it from their father, the adoration for their wild, their beastliness, their rhythm and companionship. While Ronan was a competent rider, it was Matthew who showed any real proficiency at it. His spoke their language of physicality. He was a natural. 

“You’re here to take her back, then?” Matthew’s voice was thick with disappointment. He was always looking for _one more ride_ or _just a little longer on the run_.

“I am,” Ronan said, taking hold of her bridle. “She needs a brushing. Look what you’ve done to her.” He smiled as he said it. Matthew smiled back. 

Ronan pulled at the lines, leading her away. “Don’t you miss supper again,” he chided. “Mum’ll come out looking for you herself and I can assure you, you don’t want that.” 

Matthew shook his head, but was still grinning. Ronan loved that smile. Matthew was perhaps the only light left in his world anymore. It was simple, with Matthew. There were no questions, hardly any expectations, and an innocence that warmed him in the bleak chill of life in Birmingham.

“She needs a name, you know,” Matthew called out, when Ronan was some length away from him.

“She’s yours.You can name her,” he called over his shoulder. Matthew let out a whooping cry from behind, and Ronan smiled. 

It was nearly midday by the time he was in the midst of Small Heath again. He weaved the horse through the streets with practiced ease, evading long trains of men out for their lunches, the shrill laughter of children kicking cans through the filth in the road, and around corners into the familiar folds of his neighborhood. 

As forgotten and destitute as this place was, crowded and smog-ridden, Ronan could see it’s allure. It was a small reassurance to be familiar with a place, something grounding in wearing that familiarity like a second skin…it was almost like being known, truly known, down into his withered core, even when he worked so very hard to remain unknowable, an enigma. This _place_ knew him, created him, greeted him with every slam of a hammer, every billow of fire, the slurring words of drunks stumbling from pubs. 

A man shouted his name in greeting from one of the factory bays, as they often did, and another man, blind, huddling next to piles of rubbish, held a hat out to him. Ronan tipped two coins into the hat, pulled the horse around the next bend in the street. 

A rupture from one of the factories, clanging steel and flying sparks, a massive cloud of red and orange and heat, the dirtied skin men, shouting, billowing thick plumes of smoke from within. The horse reared, panicked and kicking, braying wildly. 

It threw Ronan’s grip, pranced in place, shaking it’s head as if to escape the chaotic noise. Ronan came back to it’s side, took hold of the lines again, pulling for control. The horse kicked again, cried as another cloud of swirling fire kicked to life from within the factory. 

“Hey, hey,” Ronan soothed, pulling on the lines, running a soothing hand along the beast’s snout. It’s breathing was frantic, uneven. “Shh, shh.”

The horse was no longer kicking or prancing, but still tossed it’s head side to side, avoiding Ronan’s tranquil voice. 

“In France, we used to say it was the band kicking up,” Ronan comforted, whispered amongst the din, whispered right into the horse’s ear. “Just trombones and tubas, that’s all.” The horse whinnied, but it was a quiet thing, blunted and fading and calm, finally calm. 

“It’s just noise.” Ronan pressed his face against it’s neck. “You get used to it. It’s just noise.”

When he was sure the horse was calm, as calm as it would be in the cacophony of midday around the factories, he pulled it along again. He was just passing The Garrison, when he noticed the limp. “Got a bit of pain, girl?” he said, slowing his pace to watch her favor her left side. 

It was this look, this small moment of distraction that had him nearly walk into a stream of swill as it was tossed from The Garrison’s back door. It splattered against the graveled ground, specks of dirt and tobacco and God knows what else flicked up onto the legs of his pants, over the toes of his shoes.

The horse kicked, but without much energy. Ronan just pulled hard on her bridle and she stilled again.

He turned, found the bucket first, held in pure white hands, red knuckled, strong, but thin. He found the person second, holding the bucket, eyes wide, half in the shadowy enclave of The Garrison’s door, half in the muddled street, watching Ronan, panic stricken. Or maybe just agitated. It was hard to tell on a face like that, a face so angled it hardly looked real. _More statue than human,_ Ronan’s mind supplied, which was highly unhelpful just now.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Lynch,” Adam Parrish said. He didn’t sound sorry, not in the way Harry often sounded sorry, that cross between abject terror and submissiveness. Adam Parrish just sounded shocked, shocked in that way where you don’t expect to run into someone you were very much hoping to run in to, perhaps not under these circumstances, but certainly hoping, either way.

Ronan found, as he often found, that he didn’t have anything to say. It was better not to speak in situations like these, an assertion of dominance against those you deemed weak. 

But did Ronan think this man was weak? Ronan wasn’t sure he thought of this man at all, not in any concrete way. Maybe just about his hands, their strangeness in their pure white skin, the tough, calloused knuckles. And maybe he thought about the hair, too, the pillowy waves of dirt colored blond. These two things in particular said a lot about who Adam Parrish was, though Ronan was as of yet uncertain _what_.

Other than that? No, Ronan didn’t think of this man, not enough to form a sentence, not enough even to reprimand him for almost covering him and his horse in refuse. 

“I’m Adam, by the way,” Adam said, into the awkward, stunted silence. As if Ronan had no clue who he was. Ronan might have smiled if he hadn’t used up his smiling on Matthew. 

“I know who you are.” Ronan just looked at him, pale blue eyes unblinking. His mind was pleasantly blank, fuzzy with static, and he felt assured. _No,_ he thought. _I have nothing to say to this man._

But he didn’t make to keep moving. He let two men carrying a large sack of grain pass, then a woman with her shopping and two babes tottering at her feet. He just stood there, hand clenching and unclenching along the leather of the horse’s lines.

“She’s a magnificent horse,” Adam said, jerking his chin out towards the beast. “What’s her name?”

“She doesn’t have a name.”

Adam’s eyes flash hurriedly along the beautiful white flanks of the horse, the waving mane, flickering ears. He looked…disconcerted, maybe. Disquieted.

 _Ah._

Ronan may not have anything to say to Adam, but he sensed that Adam had plenty he wanted to say to him. Adam’s cheeks were tinged red along the jutting length of bone, eyebrows furrowed under some weighted concentration, or perhaps under his attempt to look anything but nonplussed in Ronan’s presence. 

“Do you have something you want to say to me?” Ronan asked, if only to watch the strange way Adam shifted his eyes around, avoiding eye contact at all cost, and yet somehow maintaining some form of respectable presence. His shoulders were squared, as if preparing for a fight. Ronan wondered if _that’s_ what he wanted. A fight Ronan could provide.

Adam just shrugged, flattened a hand against his rounded collar. “The other night you came into the pub and said singing wasn’t allowed.” 

So he _was_ looking for a fight. Ronan squared his shoulders too, widened his stance. Adam still wasn’t looking at him, not directly. He was looking somewhere distant, somewhere over Ronan’s left shoulder. It made Ronan bristle uncomfortably.

“I’d like there to be one night a week where there’s singing,” Adam continued, voice firm. 

Not a fight, Ronan realized. A negotiation.

Ronan swallowed, let out a strong, hot breath from his nose. Ronan Lynch didn’t negotiate with bar men.

“It’ll be good,” Adam assured, “for everyone.” 

And finally, _finally_ Adam looked at him. He didn’t look afraid, necessarily, and somehow that impressed Ronan. Why should this bar man have any response other than fear when standing before Ronan Lynch? But no, it was earnestness he saw in Adam’s eyes, dull grey reflecting warmth and red from the fire of the factories.

Still, Ronan remained silent, appraising, flicked his eyes along the length of Adam’s body, realizing something about the other man, tucking it away for further reflection when he was alone in his room, alone with his pipe.

Adam shifted under the scrutiny of Ronan’s eyes, but did not falter. “Saturday night,” he pressed. “Harry was too afraid to ask.”

“But you’re not?” An accusation. Adam’s face stuttered, his eyes flicked back to that far off place they’d been focused on before. Ronan grasped wildly into his arsenal for ways to bring that gaze back to his own, and hated himself for it.

“I am,” Adam said, finally, eyes unblinking, shoulders strong and resolute. Ronan felt a spike of interest in the honesty of the moment. A spike of interest for this man. “But I love to sing.”

Against all logic, Ronan’s lip twitched. Adam’s eyes found the movement immediately, like a moth to light. 

Again, Ronan bristled. “You sound like one of them posh boys come over from Dublin,” Ronan charged, but it was that interest, again, nowhere near the standoffishness from moments prior, “for the races.”

It was Adam’s turn to shift, and he did, from foot to foot. His eyes darkened unpleasantly. He looked older for it, faded.

“Do you like horses?” Ronan asked, partly to see the darkness fade from Adam’s eyes, but mainly because he was suddenly struck with an idea. 

Adam just gawked at him, then at the horse, then back at him. “What does it matter if I like horses?” he asked.

“How do you fancy earning some extra money?” Ronan tried again. The plan was unfolding nicely. Cheltenham was soon, and Kavinsky would be there, as he always was, and Ronan needed a date, a good looking one, if he was to ever tempt Kavinsky. 

Adam’s voice was hollow and distant, when he spoke, and his eyes where no longer dark, but blank. He was looking over Ronan’s left shoulder again, fading. “Doing what?” Adam asked, a vacant flicker.

Ronan’s hand was white on the leather bridle. “Dig out something nice to wear,” he said, bitterly, knowing Adam couldn’t and wouldn’t refuse him, and yet hating himself for having asked at all. “We’re going to the races.”

Ronan snapped the lines close to him, pulled the horse away from The Garrison and Adam and that harrowing, empty look in his eyes. If he didn’t like what he heard coming out of Ronan’s mouth, then he’d just have to learn not to talk to him at all.

—

“I want to see her in a Spanish saddle,” Ronan snapped at the stable hand. The boy ran off to find the right piece and Ronan was left alone with the horse in her stable.

It ate greedily from the bag by the door while Ronan rubbed at her hair with a thick brush. 

For whatever ungodly reason, Ronan was in a foul mood, and it had absolutely nothing to do with a certain blond bar man. Ronan didn’t care what other people thought of him, not really, and especially not the rot from under the toe of his boot, especially not suspicious bar men who threw swill nearly onto his pant legs.

Ronan rubbed the brush back and forth, let the aggression melt into the rhythm of the chore.

Who was this Adam Parrish, anyway? His accent was strange, hovering somewhere between working class and posh, like he’d grown up in the gutter, but found his way into the palace, and he dressed far too conservative for the likes of The Garrison. Maybe he wasn’t actually a whore. Maybe he was running from something. Maybe he was no one at all, and Ronan was losing his mind for thinking this long on the subject at all.

Ronan scrubbed aggressively at the right leg until the horse snorted and moved away. 

He stood up, tossed the brush into the corner of the stall, where it clattered loudly, then rubbed an arm over his sweating forehead. The stable boy still wasn’t back, but there was a woman watching him, from the far end of the enclosure. She had her hands in her pockets, a cap pulled low over her eyes.

“She’s a beautiful creature,” Helen Gansey said, slowly sauntering towards him through the dry hay. “But is she worth falling out with the Sargent family over?”

Ronan immediately stopped thinking about Adam Parrish and his disdain for spending time with Ronan Lynch and focused on Gansey’s biological sister. With rapt attention.

“If you have something to say, then say it,” he snarled. This was Helen’s stable, certainly, but the Peaky Blinders paid for it. Helen technically worked for him. Helen technically didn’t care. She had an unchecked attitude and a sense for mothering that boiled Ronan’s blood. How she knew about the Sargent’s was beyond maddening. Why she was trying to reprimand him for it was equally infuriating.

“Catch,” she said, and pulled one hand out of her trousers and tossed something at him. 

It was tiny, and it glinted in the splintering afternoon light as it twirled towards him.

Ronan caught it with ease, a cold, near insubstantial thing. 

He unfolded his hand. Saw it.

“Just passing along the message,” Helen said, close now. Her tone rivaled Aurora’s. They both had a penchant for derision when it came to Ronan.

In his hand, a single silver bullet. On the side, carved or chiseled as with a knife, his name. Just the first name. You didn’t need much more than that to know. 

“Declaration of war,” she mused. “The whole Sargent clan.”

He rolled the bullet over in his fingers, watched the etching flint through the shadowy light. He could hear the horse breathing next to him. He could feel Helen’s formidable fury.

“First the guns and now this?” Helen breathed. 

Ronan’s eyes snapped to hers. How did she know about the guns? He thought, unfairly, of Gansey. 

He wrenched open the stall door and stalked out, until they were nose to nose. “The guns are not spoken off,” he seethed, just barely above a whisper.

Helen tilted her her chin up, assessing him. 

Because Ronan had little care for Helen and her assessments, he stepped back and away, turned, tucked the bullet into his coat pocket. 

“Ronan,” she called after him. He kept walking. “You mind how you talk to me.”

Ronan barked out an unpleasant laugh. “Forgive me, _sister”_

When he was nearly out of the stables, cigarette hanging from his mouth, Helen called after him again. “Ronan Lynch against the whole fucking world!” 

And so maybe it was. 

The Peaky Blinders were back at war, not only with Chief Inspector Whelk, but now with the Sargents, and soon to be Kavinsky and his ilk—Monaghan boy was their ticket to that front line. 

He didn’t need Helen or Gansey or Aurora to tell him that he was losing his mind; he lost it, years ago, underground, a German’s arm around his neck, the air bleeding out of his lungs. He lost it when he returned home, found that his friends were changed men, or dead, or dying, or just as insane as he was. 

Ronan Lynch didn’t need anyone. He would ride his tidal wave, crush his enemies, become king of Small Heath. He didn’t need anyone. Not even beautiful bar men. Not even Adam Parrish. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unbeta'd. 
> 
> hi there, hope you're enjoying so far. things are starting to ~happen~! i know a lot of you haven't seen peaky, so please let me know if something is unclear! im loving writing this, and i expect another chapter very soon...would love to hear your thoughts! 
> 
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	5. Chapter 5

_Never mind how I’m keeping._  
_As of right now, I’m losing it_  
_As if I had it in the first place_  
_Running water in the bathroom._  
_It’s 3AM and I can’t sleep._  
_I don’t even recognize me._  
  
Paranoia — Liza Anne

—

It was Moss who found her, in the end.

Smart though she was, she was equally young. Too trusting. Obsessive, also, especially when it came to the pictures. That bloody Rudolph Valentino. She couldn’t stay away.

The picture house was showing _Stolen Moments_ just after midday. Through the red of his rage, he might have noted that this was her fifth time seeing it, maybe sixth. He should have known to check here. He should have known she wouldn’t stay away.

It was dark blue and shimmery yellow on the inside of the theater, quiet aside from the dull whir of the projector up above. He stood there, just inside, the doors swinging closed behind him, a rhythmic beat, back and forth, back and forth as he searched the crowd for her.

The bodies were spaced haphazardly among the low seats, some pairs with their faces pressed close together, others alone, ducked comfortably against the wood and velvet. Soft tendrils of smoke wafted in the hazy air, cigarettes blown lazy and content.

In the haze he found a silhoutte, familiar hair cropped close beneath her ears. She was at the front of the theater, head upturned to the glowing images against the canvas. Her thin hand dipped into a tiny bag of popcorn, then moved to her mouth, then back again to the popcorn.

He pulled his own hands out of his pockets. She had always been insatiable, sitting as close to the screen as humanly possible, as if being more than a few rows back meant she’d miss something important. If he weren’t so angry, he might just growl, but his anger took a different form today—he felt calm. The inevitability of this moment had hung over him for months. Years, even. It was so familiar it was as if he’d worn it as a coat each winter since he returned from the front.

He walked slowly from the back of the theater to the second row. She didn’t see him, not until he came down the aisle and sat in the seat one over from her. She turned her head then, just as Valentino wrapped his hands around the butler’s neck. 

Ronan turned to her then, too, and their eyes meet in the rippling light from the projector.

She wasn’t afraid. Opal was never fearful of Ronan. He loved her more for it, even if he himself felt murderous just now. 

“Why have you been hiding?” he asked. 

She laughed, turned back to the screen, popped more popcorn into her mouth. She always knew how to put on a good show. She always knew how to push the boundaries without breaking anything too important.

Ronan’s skin boiled.

“Look at me, Opal.”

“And why should I?” Another handful of popcorn. She crunched it loudly. Didn’t look away from the screen.

_She’s young_ he reminded himself. And yet it was starting not to matter. 

Age stopped mattering when he cornered his mother in The Garrison two days past. It stopped mattering when Aurora admitted she’d been to see Opal. That she knew where she was. That Opal didn’t want to see Ronan, didn’t want to see _any_ of her brothers, for that matter. It stopped mattering when Aurora, flustered and angry and just up to _here_ with Ronan’s taciturn attitudes, shouted at him that his sister was very much pregnant and he’d do well to leave her alone. 

The room dropped out after that. Aurora must have known what she’d done to him, because she had her hand wrapped around his upper arm no sooner than the words left her mouth. She was shaking him, telling him to keep his cool. Telling him that she had it under control. That Opal was _fine_. 

But no, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Opal was gone, hiding. Hiding since the raid on the communists. Hiding because she was pregnant. Pregnant with—

“What’s the man’s name, Opal?” His voice was a stinging thing, unforgiving and hard. 

She snorted. Shoved more popcorn into her mouth. A few pieces missed. She didn’t care.

On screen Valentino had the butler in a choke hold. They were both struggling.

“The man’s name, Opal.” But he knew the man’s name, didn’t he? He just needed her to say it. Out loud. 

But Opal was strong in places Ronan was not. She smirked at him, eyes aglow with the black and white frames of the picture. “Rudolph Valentino,” she said.

Ronan surged out of his seat and stormed to the back of the theater. If she wanted to play games, Ronan could play games of his own.

He pushed open the black curtain hiding the entrance to the projection booth, climbed the stairs two at a time. At the top was a small room, a single man sat smoking, watching the film play out through the tiny hole in the wall where the projector lens pointed. 

“You,” Ronan growled. “Stop the film.”

The man startled, turned to see him there, shadowed and fuming, and had the nerve to raise a skeptical eyebrow at him. “Who the bloody fuck do you think—“ 

But he didn’t get to finish his question. Ronan ripped the strands of negative from the lines that cascaded from the ceiling. The film spluttered, gasped, rippled into nothing. Groans from within the theater. 

“What the fuck!” The man shouted, tried to grab the pieces without letting his cigarette near the negative. 

Ronan was back at the stairs. The man looked at him like he was a wild animal. Maybe he was. “By order of the Peaky fucking Blinders.”

Ronan spit, ran down the stairs again and out into the theater. 

People were squirming in their seats, turned towards the projector booth. Ronan didn’t bloody care about their precious movie and their precious Rudolph Valentino. He needed a name. And he needed Opal to say it.

“OUT!” he shouted into the din of the theater. “EVERYBODY OUT!”

Heads turned. Saw who it was. Jumped out of their seats, scurried towards the nearest exit. Opal was unmoving.

He stopped at the end of her aisle. “I said,” he breathed, “give me his fucking name.”

She let out a long sigh, so hard and sudden it shook through her entire body. She looked horribly frail, all of a sudden, shoulders hunched into the velvet seat. How she could be pregnant, Ronan didn’t know. Didn’t want to believe. 

But then she turned her head towards him. Her face was a mishmash of familiar lines, and she looked much older than he’d ever seen her before, regardless of how frail she might be. They held each other’s eyes for a weighted moment, and Ronan felt the coldness before she even spoke.

But when she did, her voice was a hot iron to cool skin. “Henry fucking Cheng.”

His face must have done a complicated thing, a combination of drained color and deadening eyes, because she laughed at him, cold and derisive and horribly, horribly cruel. 

“Yeah,” she said, “you’re best mate since school. The man who saved your life in France.”

Was he breathing? He couldn’t tell, not really. He had to be, he knew, in some abstract way. He was still standing and watching her and he could hear how ragged her own breathing was, but something prickled behind his eyes, something so rare and so forbidden it felt like he might die on his feet. 

He had known. Of course he knew. Aurora so much as told him. She spoke around the fact for weeks. He’d figured it out long before. Was waiting for a signal, some opening where he could find Henry Cheng and cut him. Cut him to little pieces. 

Opal wasn’t laughing anymore, but her eyes were as dark as the tunnels in France. “Go on,” she snarled at him. “Go on. Find him. Find him and cut him up. Cut him and chuck him into the fucking Cut!”

But he was storming away from her. He kicked open the theater door and out into the startling sunlight, grey and bright and dingy. Fucking Birmingham. Fucking Henry Cheng and his fucking Bolsheviks.

Fucking Opal.

—

Monaghan Boy lost on a Monday. It was his third race.

It was just as Ronan wanted it. Just as he told Declan it would be. Just as he and Gansey prepared for. 

The winnings were…substantial, to say the least. The most they’d ever seen. It was not only Small Health who bet this time, not just the washer women and their husbands, not just the curious boys fast out the factories, or the drunks from the pubs looking for a lucky nag. It was all of Birmingham, everyone from the sewer to the clubs, the shanties to the private boxes at the opera. 

_Everyone_.

And Ronan was surrounded by their money. Piles of it, paper stacked neat and trim on the edge of the table. Hats filled with coins around the legs of his chair. Their winnings were tallied high on the chalk board. He and Gansey were at the counting all night, too excited to let the any of the other men see to it. Too hyped on adrenaline and booze and tobacco to sleep. 

Gansey asked after Opal, as he was wont to do, and Ronan ignored him, as was his prerogative. Gansey, to his benefit, let it go. He knew when to press Ronan. Knew when to let it go.

Ronan knew it wouldn’t be as easy with Declan. But Declan wasn’t here, was he? He was out spending his share down at The Garrison, probably with some useless blond straddling his lap. The inquisition would come later. When he was sober. Or maybe not sober. Probably not sober. When was the last time he’d been sober?

Gansey had gone to sleep hours ago. It was just Ronan in the den, now. He was smoking, sipping on a whiskey, neat. 

When a door opened to his left, he knew it was his mother without looking up. She had a way about her, a way of walking, _existing_ , really, exuding both strength and command as if she deserved your undying attention without actually putting in the work. 

Ronan looked up at her. Couldn’t help the surge of gratitude for this woman, which was just as quickly replaced with his ire. Aurora had known. She’d protected Opal and Opal’s withering secret.

Aurora stood in front of him, let her eyes wander across the stacks of bills, piles of coin, ledgers half open, pens stuck into ink wells. Finally, she looked at him.

“So,” she said, “the horse finally lost.”

Ronan spread out his arms, whiskey in one hand, cigarette in the other. He gave her a little smile. It was a deprecating thing. “Third time’s not so lucky, now is it?” Aurora’s eyebrows shot up. “We took money from all over the city.”

“But I taught you well, didn’t I?” she said, fishing for something.

“It’s already been done,” he dropped his arms. Sipped his whiskey. “Paid back to the people of Small Heath. Nothing to fret over, mother.” 

“Is that so?” she asked, and then she leaned over the table he was sitting at, both hands flat against the wood. It was nearly midnight. Her face was pale blue and shadowed and hardly there. “Did you get permission to fix this race from Joseph Kavinsky?” 

Ronan spread his arms again, a silent _so what if I didn’t?_ What else could he do? He certainly couldn’t please everyone, and it was enough to have Declan on his ass. Declan! Who didn’t know the first thing about running a business.

Aurora straightened. Her shoulders were so rigid they might cut through the darkness of the night. She might have been a statue.

But then, so sudden, like a snake in the brush, she reached out and took his whiskey glass, chucked it across the room and against the far wall. It made contact, smashed, split into a million pieces, brown liquid spraying. 

“Obviously I didn’t teach you well enough!” she snarled at him, leaned back against the table. “Rule one. Don’t punch above your weight.”

Ronan rolled his eyes, met her in the middle of the table. Smirked, cruel. “Joseph Kavinsky is a piece of shit,” he breathed. “And he’s there for the taking.”

“Say’s who?” she countered. “Ronan Lynch and his army of one?”

Ronan didn’t back down. Slapped his hand on the table with each word as he spoke. “Strike. While. Your. Enemy. Is Weak.” 

“Because you know Kavinsky so well.”

“He’s a drunk. He’s addicted to snow. And he’s a piece of shit.” Ronan stood, turned his back to his mother, and tossed his forgotten cigarette into the small fire in the hearth. He was done talking about Joseph Kavinsky, even if his mother wasn’t. “I thought you were here to talk about family business.”

“I’ll take care of Opal. You’re too busy fighting a war in your head or conquering the world. I haven’t decided yet.”

Still not looking at her, placing his hand on the cool stone above the hearth, he said, “Tell me.”

The fire cracked. It was low. It was dying. It felt important, somehow.

Aurora took a shuddering breath behind him. He almost turned. Almost wrapped his arms around her shoulders. But that was what Ronan might have done before. That Ronan didn’t exist anymore.

“She wrote a letter,” she finally said. “And she wants you to give it to Henry.”

Ronan snorted. The fire jumped again.

“He needs to know she’s having his baby.” She was a fierce thing, his mother, even when she knew she was losing a battle. “They deserve a chance.”

He turned, then, face twisted horribly, something hostile. Aurora held up the letter to him. 

“For a woman who’s had a hard life with men, you’re still full of romance.” Aurora’s eyes darkened. “What do you think he sees in our Opal?”

She knew what he wanted her to say, but wouldn’t allow herself to utter it. Wouldn’t allow him the satisfaction of hearing it from her own mouth. There was a war beneath her eyes, a war both vicious and painful. Her face was twisted with it. And yet, she was stubborn. She wouldn’t say it.

Ronan smirked, near inhuman in it’s brutishness. “It’s the guns,” he said. “It’s his revolution. This isn’t about Opal. It never has been.”

“You were friends once,” she tried, a tinge of desperation in her voice. She held out the letter to him. He took it. 

He turned it over and over in his hands. It was warm from where she kept it in her breast pocket. Opal’s handwriting was small and cramped and slanted. Messy.

He almost felt a pang of remorse, then, for his sister and her baby. For the man who was once his closest friend. Almost.

“What is it you don’t like about Henry Cheng anyway?” Aurora tried.

“Opal will never have a life with a man on the run, mum,” he said. “You’re blind if you don’t see that.”

And he tossed the letter into the fire, stomped it with his boot. 

“No!” Aurora shouted, ran over from the side of the table, picked up the fire poker and tried to rescue the fast charring paper. 

When she saw it was useless, when the paper curled and evaporated into the flames, she held the poker above his head like she might strike him across the temple with it. 

He just looked at her. Some twisted part of him hope she would strike him.

But she tossed it onto the ground. It rolled and clanged and lay there at his feet. “Damn them for what they did to you in France!” she shouted. 

If only she knew the whole of it. If only she knew how often he wished not to wake up from his sleep. If only she’d struck him. If only any of it mattered.

“Tell her Henry went to Russia.” He said it calm. He wasn’t looking at her, but like always, he felt her there like a room full of people. She was a live wire. She was animus incarnate. 

She took hold of her coat, after a while, threw it over her shoulders. Ronan had the bottle of whiskey in his hand by this point, was tugging at the neck of it like his life depended on it. She was halfway to the door when he said, “Truth is, you would have hit me with that thing if you didn’t think I was right.”

She slammed the door on the way out. Let her go.

—

Barrington Whelk hated tea, and by extension, tearooms.

They were much too bright. And much too quiet. The serving women sniffled too often, and the maître d’hôtel actually huffed at him when she heard his accent. As if she couldn’t tell the difference between an Ulsterman and a nationalist. 

For all of it’s finery, the pink papered walls, the pungent flowers stuffed in vases and littered across white clothed tables, the shiny silver and the clinking china, it was all horribly garish. Barrington would much rather a cup of coffee in his private office. A single scone and the paper, neatly folded on the edge of his desk. The regalia of these middle class tea rooms was ridiculous and showy and distracting.

He pulled at his collar, sipped at the now chill tea. It was overly milky, and much too sweet. He had the serving girl make it for him and she used a heavy hand on both the cream and sugar. His upturned his lips in displeasure.

He would much rather be back at the office. Or with Adam. 

Not that he could be seen out in public with Adam. Not that it was appropriate to even think about Adam, given the professional nature of their relationship.

Besides, he couldn’t possibly meet Ronan Lynch anywhere in Birmingham. It was unsafe. And it also pleased him to draw Lynch away from his home. He had no connections here. He was utterly alone.

It was half past nine when the gangster scum deigned to show his face. He was a half hour late. And he looked smug about it, hovering there in the wide double doors. 

A serving woman tripped over her feet when she tried to look at him and he all but snarled at her, like a rabid beast. 

Ronan Lynch might be wearing a three piece suit, but his peaked flat cap screamed of his classlessness. Barrington knew what he and his kind kept sewn into the hems of those hats, had witnessed a cutting first hand on his second day in Small Heath. 

The Peaky Blinders were monsters, the lot of them, but Barrington was sure Ronan Lynch knew where the missing guns were. Ronan Lynch knew everything that happened in Small Heath. That’s what Adam’s intel provided.

He watched Ronan slowly weave through the circular tables. Older women turned their eyes away. The younger set watched him curiously, some turning their noses up at him. He didn’t seem to pay them any mind. His face was stony and cold and vacant as he came to halt in front of Barrington’s chair.

“London,” he said, sounding bored. “Better tea than Birmingham?”

Barrington’s nostrils flared. “Won’t you sit down, Mr. Lynch?”

Ronan tilted his chin up, cast his eyes down, watchful and assessing. He didn’t move to sit down.

“I chose this place,” Barrington continued, sipping again at the cold tea, “as it was outside both of our jurisdictions.”

“The Home Office is in London,” Ronan said, still bored, as if Barrington wasn’t pulling his weight in the conversation. But then he sat, and Barrington felt a small surge of victory.

“So it is,” he nodded. He held a hand up and a woman appeared with a pot of tea. “Would you like some tea?”

Ronan pushed his chair out, leaned back, hands pushed deep into his trouser pockets. He didn’t bother looking at the woman and her pot of tea, just kept gazing down his nose at Barrington. Was he trying to be intimidating? He just looked petulant.

Barrington waved the woman away. 

When they were alone again, Ronan spoke. “Inspector, I responded to your invitation because I want us to understand each other.”

Barrington decided that he hated the sound of Ronan Lynch’s voice. It was just a notch above too deep, as if all the smoothness had be rubbed away from it. It also dripped with peevishness, and that irked Barrington to no end. Ronan Lynch thought he deserved something. Barrington was there to prove him otherwise.

“I’m a businessman,” Ronan said, “and I want my business to be successful.”

“And I want Birmingham to run peacefully.” 

“If the city is at peace, business can thrive.” 

Barrington laughed. _Yes_ , Ronan Lynch was a petulant child. “So,” he snorted, “we’re on the same side.”

“We could be.”

Barrington let his eyes travel over Ronan’s body, the long slip of it, his muscular shoulders, his forearms protruding from his pockets, down to his legs, square and strong and jutting, an image of total disdain. Barrington would never align himself with filth like this.

“How could we ever be on the same side, Mr. Lynch, when I’ve seen things like this.” He reached into his jacket and withdrew a small slip of paper, pushed it across the length of table separating them. 

Ronan took it, unfolded it. Barrington watched his face carefully. It was frustratingly calm, though something in his eyes changed. Sparked.

“That has your sisters name on it,” Barrington said, watching Ronan tuck the paper into his own breast pocket. “Prescription for iron tablets found in the bedroom of a known communist. She had obviously been sleeping in his bed. Are you also in bed with the communists, Mr. Lynch?”

Ronan leaned back in his chair again. “They live in a fantasy world,” he drawled. “And I’ve already dealt with my sister.”

“Henry Cheng is that the very top of my list.”

A muscle jumped pleasantly in Ronan’s jaw. “Cross him off,” the other man growled. “He won’t be returning to the city. I’ll make that part of our deal.”

_Ah._ It was Barrington’s turn to sit back in his chair. He crossed his arms, let his own smirk fill out his aging face. So, Ronan Lynch thought they’d be making a deal, did he? 

“What deal?” he all but laughed.

The muscle in Ronan’s jaw jumped again. Barrington smirked wider.

“Your men will leave my business alone. No more raids or smashing up pubs. You’ll ignore my gambling operations.” 

He was reckless, this Lynch. Adam had been correct in his assessment. Barrington would have to remember to commend him on his skill of observation the next time they met.

But Ronan was still talking, leaning forward now, too. “I’m planning an expansion onto the race tracks. I’ll be entering into business with Joseph Kavinsky. He runs most of the legal tracks in these parts. I want your men to make sure the police on his payroll keep off our backs.”

Barrington couldn’t help but laugh out loud. It was clamorous and sudden and one of the serving women startled behind him at the sound of it. “Forgive me,” he said, waving his hands facetiously. “I don’t seem to have a pen to write down your list of demands.”

Ronan pushed a pen across the table to him. His face was not smiling. It was sharp lines and serious.

“And what, pray, do _I_ get in return?” This was ridiculous. Ronan Lynch would be lucky not to walk out of this meeting in cuffs. Bribing a officer of the crown? Barrington looked forward to chaining this scum for life.

But now Ronan was smirking. 

It was a small thing, brows pulled low over his eyes. The dark pools of his pupils danced in the mid afternoon light. He looked dangerous all of a sudden. Savage.

“I have what you’re looking for,” Ronan Lynch said at long last.

And if Barrington was expecting anything, it hadn’t been that. No, he thought Lynch might know who had them. He thought he might strong arm Lynch into retrieving them for him. He thought, maybe, he’d get to throw Lynch and his merry men of bandits behind bars once this all was over. Did he think it was the Peaky Blinders who had the guns after all?

Well. 

“I have the guns.”

“What guns?” Barrington asked. He tried to school his voice, but something cracked in the cadence of it and Ronan Lynch smirked ever wider.

“Twenty five Lewis machine guns, ten thousand rounds of ammunitions. All bound for Libya.”

Barrington realized he hadn’t taken a breath in a very long time, and so he did, slowly, in through his nose and out through his mouth. Ronan watched him, gaze so heavy it was like he could see inside Barrington’s mind.

“You realize,” Ronan drawled, “if I don’t walk out of here a free man, those guns will be on their way to Liverpool so fast it’ll break your neck. Then, of course, onto Belfast. You know very well who will buy them there.”

It was a blatant threat. Of course it was.

Barrington felt the dampness on the back of his neck, then under his hairline, the way his palms became a slick and unmanageable thing. 

“Irish Republican Army,” Ronan was saying. Barrington heard him as if through a long, windy tunnel.

Ronan was still smirking, a victorious lift of the lips. He drew lazy designs with the tip of his pointer finger along the white table cloth. Barrington might not have been there at all, for all Ronan seemed to care about him. He knew he had won this round. Barrington was a small piece in some larger game for the Blinders. 

Barrington wanted to crawl out of his own skin.

“Of course,” Ronan didn’t seem to want to stop, “Mr. Churchill mustn’t have been very pleased with you after the burning of the King’s portraits. If he learns you let the guns sell to the IRA, it would be your job.”

Ronan looked at him, then, square in the eyes. “I’ll need an answer. Now.”

Barrington’s breath was shaky when he let it out, shaky with nerves and rage and every other bottled up hatred he had for the likes of Ronan Lynch and his vermin family. 

“Inspector?” Ronan probed. He was laughing at him. Actually laughing.

“Very well,” Barrington gritted. He could hardly get it out. “But I’d prefer if we didn’t shake hands.”

Ronan stood. Stepped around the table so he was looming overtop of him. That look was back, that predatory black pool of hatred. “Now,” Ronan whispered, “why would I ever shake hands with a man who didn’t even fight for his country?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SOOO so sorry for the delay. this chapter was a little tricky, as it's a bit plot heavy, but necessary. i promise there is some adam in the upcoming chapters (: 
> 
> your comments have been so unbelievably kind! you're making it possible to continue on.
> 
> as always, unbeta'd. find me on [tumblr](https://onthesea-mystery.tumblr.com/)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello! so part 3 of this chapter involves an animal death. it is by no means graphic, but it is alluded to, so please beware! & enjoy<3

_I am the captain of my pain_  
_Tis the bit, the bridle_  
_The phrasing cane_  
_The stirrup, the harness_  
_and the whipping mane_  
  
Brother My Cup Is Empty — Nick Cave

—

A hand wrapped around his bicep and tugged him from the road into a dank alleyway.

Flashes of his training—how to subdue an attacker, where to strike and how hard, that far off place in his mind he was to escape to in case he was taken hostage.

His body slammed against cold stone, head smacking onto the wall hard enough he saw stars behind closed lids. The whole of it happened so quickly he did’t have time to strike back, to try an maneuver his way out of the hands holding his shoulders in place against the building. He was shaking.

He wondered if it would be quick. 

“I have new information,” came the voice of his captor.

Adam opened his eyes. Slow.

In the dimness of the alley, Barrington Whelk looked pallid and thin. Adam grimaced and tugged his body free from his superior officer’s grasp.

“Are you out of your mind?” he whispered, incredulous, rubbing a hand over a spot on his arm that was surely to bruise. “Pulling people into alley’s and slamming them against walls?”

Barrington stepped back, put his hands into his pockets, looked at the mouth of the alley—it was brighter there, the faint glowing grey of Birmingham that Adam was steadily getting used to.

“I needed to speak to you,” Barrington murmured. “It couldn’t wait.”

Adam took stock of the other man, shoulders hunched under his woolen coat, eyes erratic and unsteady. Was he expecting an attack, here, of all places? His hair was mussed under his hat, and the top button of his shirt undone. It was a peculiar sight; Chief Inspector Barrington Whelk, disheveled. 

“You do realize how dangerous it is meeting here?” Adam asked. Why he had to remind Inspector Whelk was lost on him entirely.

“It couldn’t wait.”

It was Adam’s turn to look at the mouth of the alley. People shuffled past, dark silhouettes in the late afternoon glow. “Then what is it?”

Barrington paced, sedated and deliberate. Adam felt uncertain.

“Ronan Lynch,” Barrington spoke the name as both a curse and prayer, “is now the beginning, middle, and end of your mission.”

Adam swallowed. 

Someone shrieked from the street, not ten yards away. 

“And what am I to do?” Adam asked.

“I would never ask you to do this if it weren’t absolutely necessary.” Barrington’s tone dropped, became a tetchy, sharp-edged thing, “It is repugnant. Unholy.”

“What is it?” Adam bit out. The hairs on his arms stood at attention. His pulse skipped unpleasantly.

Barrington turned back to him. They met eyes in the dimness. Yes, Barrington looked half crazed in the darkness, face shadowed in the gloom of the building walls. “You must do everything in your power to get _close_ to Ronan Lynch.”

_Close._

When Adam was silent, Barrington continued. “When I say everything, I don’t mean—“

“Enough.” Adam said it so quietly it might have been missed. The pair of them were alone in the alley, but Birmingham was a noisy, ceaseless beast. They blended into the brick and mortar and ever shrieking of the dull city.

Barrington stilled, titled his head at Adam curiously.

_So. _Adam let the meaning of his new mission sink into his pores. _He was to be close to Ronan Lynch.___

“This is what is comes to,” he said, at long last, when the seconds had turned to minutes, and Barrington started finicking with his coat pockets. 

“Adam—” There was pleading there. Adam held up a hand to stop him.

“You underestimate me,” he intoned, glassy and composed. “This is my job.”

It was impossible not to think of Ronan Lynch in the moments that followed. Admittedly, Adam found it hard not to think of Ronan Lynch at all. He was in the cobwebs in Adam’s dingy flat. He was in the cracks within the cobblestone, the polished floorboards of the Garrison, each smiling face, each sob, the braying of a horse, the fire spewing from factories.

Ronan Lynch was in the very fabric of Small Heath, Birmingham. He was the thread to hold it together, and the needle that stabbed through cloth, through fingers, the needle that drew blood…

Chief Inspector Barrington Whelk may not have anticipated this turn of events, but Adam had prepared for it, maybe in an abstract way at first, the single thought that he’d do anything to bring those guns back to the hands of the law. More recently, however, it became clear that if you wanted something in Small Heath, there was only one place to go. Or, rather, only one person to see.

“Here,” Barrington said, shoving an awkwardly folded newspaper at him. Adam took it.

Opened it.

Inside, a pistol. 

Adam looked up. 

“You’re an Agent of the Crown. You should be armed like one.”

Adam folded the newspaper delicately over the gun again, tucked it into his suit jacket. He had the urge to ask Barrington what had changed. Why Ronan and why now. But the gun was heavy against his breast, and Barrington hovered far too close. Their breathing mingled. Adam smelled stale tea. 

“I’ll be late for my shift.” 

Adam made to leave, but Barrington reached out, held his arm again, gentle gentle gentle. Adam turned, looked at the man who was his superior. 

“Adam,” Barrington said, whispered, really, not looking at him. “My heart is with you.”

Adam blinked at him, then pulled his arm free.

—

In France, Ronan learned the music in the death screams.

The shrieking had once kept him awake in the cold trenches. He shivered into the noise of it, let the shiver wrap over him like a blanket until it wasn’t a shiver but a constant quaking of limbs. But then they sent him below ground, away from the bombs and the guns and into the steepness, that tricky black place that was an early grave. Beneath, the screaming was no longer screaming, but an endless symphony, discordant and out of key, some inexhaustible loudness that sunk into soil, sunk so far it found him in the dirt of the tunnels, twisted right out of the muddy walls and into his skin until he was singing with them.

The music lived in his head now. A record repeating. A record skipping. Cracking.

Screaming. Just screaming.

The opium helped. Mostly. For a little while.

He could fall asleep now, at least, and that was a small victory for a man who couldn’t remember falling asleep willfully in the last two years. If he was lucky, he slept through the night. But Ronan wasn’t often lucky. 

Most nights, it was an hour or two of uninhibited slumber before the music began. Before the hammers started on his walls. Before Steve was there, and Henry, and someone was screaming his name and someone else was screaming in German. A death scream. No. A death moan. The fading of life from body, red, warm, blood, muddy, caked, skin, skin, skin.

And if Ronan was even a little bit lucky, he’d wake up then and there and that would be the end of sleep. 

But even the littlest bit of luck evaded Ronan.

When the music began, it often didn’t end until he was signing into the darkness of his room, singing so loud that someone would shake him forcibly from the sleep. That someone was usually Gansey. That someone usually held him against his chest while he wept soundlessly, voice rusted and used and so sick of screaming. So sick of sleeping.

But the opium helped. At least he told himself it did.

Tonight, the dream was less dream and more memory. 

Tonight, he was in France. 

A single lantern swung overhead. The dark tunnel was contrasted with swaths of warm fire. 

Next to him, Steve, praying, watching the opposite wall. Henry was above, but Ronan could hear his heals on the wooden ladder, now, descending.

He too was watching the far wall. Less than ten yards away, the thin expanse of wall that separated them from the Germans and their own tunnels. 

When Henry joined them, breathing next to Ronan’s neck, Steve held up a hand. They all stopped breathing, and listened. 

At first, nothing. An explosion from above. The earth shook around them, cascading them with a shower of moist dirt.

Silence.

Steve looked over his shoulder at the pair of them. There was a question in his eyes that Ronan’s subconscious refused to let him forget. 

Because, like always, they came. 

The wall shattered in a spray of soil. There were three of them, just as dirty and grimy and dead in the eyes, and they were shouting, charging, bayonets fixed to the end of their rifles. 

The first stuck Steve through the middle. Steve’s scream was washed out by another explosion from above, by the surge of Henry at his side, plummeting forward, wrestling the gun away from the first German, shooting the second.

But the third found Ronan.

The space, so tight and narrow and dark, twisted them to the floor. Ronan couldn’t tell where he stopped and the German began. He couldn’t tell if the blood beneath his head, his torso, in his mouth, his eyes, was his or Steve’s or Henry’s.

Henry was shrieking, a war cry. Just crying. Sobs so strangled. 

Ronan opened his eyes. He was straddling the third German, both hands wrapped around the now broken neck. _How did that happen?_ He looked up. Henry held Steve in his lap. Both their bodies shuddered, but only Henry’s wailed. Steve’s eyes were darker than black, vacant and unfocused, red rimmed, _dead._

“Ronan!” Henry screamed. “Ronan!”

_Ronan! Ronan! Ronan!_

The world shook. 

Ronan opened his eyes again.

The ceiling came back first. Then the wall. Floral paper. Peeling. 

Ceiling. Wall. Window. 

There was an oil lamp burning out in the darkness of the lane. 

And someone was yelling his name.

“Ronan! Bloody hell, wake up!”

France never faded, and yet he sat up. Outside his window, through endless sheets of rain, Helen.

—

It was cold. Thunder rolled. The clouds shifted under the torrent of rain.

Helen took him to the stables. 

Aurora was there, by the stall of their newest horse. 

Its front right leg was tied up against its flank, grey eyes glassy and puss filled. It shook its head, neighed, once, balefully. 

“Does it have a name?” Aurora asked when Ronan was close enough. She sounded odd.

Ronan shook his head. If Matthew named it, he hadn’t told Ronan. Perhaps it was better this way.

“Tell me,” he said, unable to look away from his once beautiful horse. His blood ran cold at the sight of it, the helplessness, the fading strength. 

“A curse,” Aurora uttered. Her voice was pale and trembling.

Ronan looked at her. In the gloomy blue, he saw her face streaked and wet. 

“Mum…” He turned, almost put a hand out to her. But she stepped away from him, out of the light from the moon, into shadow, rubbing furiously at her cheeks.

“Tell me,” he insisted, again, let the hardness crisp each syllable so his empathy wouldn’t. 

“You bought that thing at the fair in bad faith, Ronan Lynch,” she accused from the shadows. “Those Sargent’s cursed a seed and put it in it’s hoof.”

He could tell she blamed him just as much as she blamed the Sargent’s. 

Something left him, then. A retreat. 

What little love he had left in his heart was for beasts such as this, and even they were not safe from the misery Ronan Lynch was sure to wrought. 

He touched his hand to the horse’s neck. His hand trembled. 

“Whatever it is,” Helen said, from the shadows, “it spread to the other feet.”

Ronan knew. 

“It’ll be in the heart by tomorrow.” That was Aurora, accusing accusing accusing.

Ronan put his head into his hands. Bellowed into the clamoring night. He knew. 

“You can’t take curses like this back, Ronan.” Accusing. Accused. Guilty.

He flexed his fingers around his skull, gripped his hair like he might pull it out. A great, seeping cavern was opening inside him. He knew what he had to do.

“I told you,” Helen said. “I told you they’d start a war.”

“Get out,” he said, sudden. “Both of you.”

And they did, because they heard it in his voice. Misery. 

Alone, Ronan prayed. 

The moon played devilishly on the sharp lines of his face. The horse watched him, silent, knowing.

He prayed. 

But praying never changed the curse of his life. The gun weighed heavy at his hip. He knew.

When he opened his eyes, the horse was still watching. Grey eyes met blue. The horse knew too, tried to pull itself from the ties holding it to the stall.

Ronan drew his gun. The prayer fled him. The gun raised. 

“I’m sorry.”

It was better this way. At least now only one of them would be living in misery.

—

In the emptiness of the pub, the rain was a stampede.

Adam sat by one of the large windows, watched it come down in sheets. 

He supposed he could leave, risk ruining one of his very few outfits fit for work. Then, maybe, he’d get a decent nights sleep. But Adam was familiar with fatigue. Waiting a little longer for the storm to let up surely wouldn’t cost him too dearly, and it would certainly save his trousers and his shoes. 

He yawned, let his forehead rest against the cool glass. His eyelids drooped. 

Today had been long. Mentally and physically. But all Adam’s days were long. He lived in a constant state of unrest; Barrington often scolded him about his lack of care for his own wellbeing.

Adam shook his head—he didn’t want to think of Chief Inspector Whelk just now. He didn’t want to think of anything, except, perhaps, the rain coming to an end.

He wrapped his arms around his shoulders, pressed fingers into the purple bruise at the top of his arm. 

He breathed, tried not to let flashes of his father consume him. Barrington hadn’t meant to grab him like that. He’d been afraid. He _needed_ Adam, that’s all.

He breathed again, shuddering.

Suddenly, urgent pounding on the front door. 

Adam stood. He looked at the door. Who could be here this late? It was after two in the morning. Certainly not Harry. Certainly not pounding like that.

The door rattled again. 

Adam touched the gun strapped beneath his pant leg, just to assure himself it was there, then went to the door.

It took him a few seconds to unbolt the latched, hands shaking from a sudden, anxious chill up his spine, but when the door swung open, it revealed Ronan Lynch, sharp and tall and soaking wet.

“We’re closed, Mr. Lynch,” he said, ridiculously, but stepped back all the same. 

Ronan came inside, pulled off his cap, and tossed it onto the bar. Adam closed the door, bolted it again.

“Just get me a drink,” Ronan growled, throwing himself into the nearest seat at the nearest table. 

Adam hesitated by the door, watching. It was quiet, still, but Ronan was alive with something loud. It rolled off him in waves, long, fired ripples that collided into Adam. 

Was Adam afraid?

Ronan had his back to him, just then, body thrown so carelessly that it almost didn’t matter if Adam was afraid. Adam had half a mind to defy him for his blatant disregard for manners. 

But Barrington’s words were there, along with something else, curiosity, perhaps. _You must do everything in your power to get close to Ronan Lynch._

Adam went behind the bar and grabbed an open bottle of Irish whiskey and a glass. He set them on the table in front of Ronan. He probably should have left, then, but duty called. He stayed, hovered above.

“What are you still doing here?” Ronan demanded, not looking up as he poured himself a generous measure of whiskey. He downed it in one go, whipped his liquor slick lips on the back of his hand. 

Annoyance flared in Adam. His pride, punctured. “I don’t mean to bother,” he ground out. It was impossible to tamp down the wariness, or the animosity. They embodied Adam, just as Ronan embodied Small Heath.

A small, inconvenient thought pricked at the back of his mind in the following silence. Barrington wished Adam to come to know Ronan Lynch, but little was Barrington privy to Adam’s best kept secret—he was unknowable. 

Why would anyone, especially the likes of Ronan Lynch, ever want to know little, poor, pathetic Adam Parrish?

It was an unfriendly thought, one Adam reserved for time of privacy. But Ronan was a weapon, poised and ready for strike, a reminder that Adam wasn’t worth the time of day, no matter how far he’d come from that horrible place across the sea.

Adam made to step away, but then Ronan shifted, a single hand, raised, as if to say _don’t go_.

Adam’s body was a devious thing—it obeyed.

“I meant,” Ronan said, when he must have realized Adam wasn’t fleeing, “why are you here so late?”

Adam blinked. Outside, the storm raged. “It’s raining,” he said. 

Ronan shifted again, his head this time, traveling from his whiskey to Adam’s torso, up its length, to his shoulders, neck, and finally, _finally_ , Adam’s eyes.

Adam’s mouth parted, partially from wont to speak, but also out of question. Ronan’s hair was short on the sides, shorn close to his scalp, but the rest piled in small, soft curls at the top of his head. A single damp curl pressed against Ronan’s forehead. Adam had the strangest urge to reach out and move it aside.

But it was Ronan’s eyes that stopped him. Large and blue and endless, they were also glassy and red-rimmed. Deep purple splotches sat beneath each—they looked sunken and tired. Ronan’s whole body looked tired. Adam wondered if Ronan too knew fatigue intimately. He wanted to ask, but didn’t know how.

“I came here for company,” Ronan said, at long last, used his hand to indicate for Adam to sit across from him.

So Adam sat.

Ronan poured another measure of whiskey, took that down as quickly as the first. 

Adam was at a loss for what to do with his hands, so he folded them in his lap. He was at a loss for what to do with the rest of his body, too, but it was impossible to make himself disappear, wasn’t it, as much as he wished he could.

What came next was a series of glances. Ronan, drinking, slamming his glass on the table, and Adam, refilling, dutifully, every watchful. Ronan’s eyes became ever glossier, pupils filling and rounding until the startling blue of his eyes was nearly lost to black. 

Ronan watched him, too, though Adam suspected he thought was being secretive about it. Whenever Adam bent his head to look at his hands, or pour more whiskey, Ronan’s eyes picked their way over his face, down his arms, across knuckles…

But when Adam looked up, Ronan’s gaze was always fixed elsewhere. Over Adam’s shoulder, on the whiskey bottle, at the large, stormy window.

Finally, when silence and whiskey didn’t seem to be enough anymore, at least not for Adam, he spoke of the first thing he could think of sharing with Ronan Lynch that didn’t remind him of being like a whore.

“How is your beautiful horse?” Adam asked.

Ronan took his time in answering, pulled a cigarette out of his case, lit it, and sat back. “I just put a bullet in its head.”

Adam’s pulse stuttered, felt a sinking hole open in him where his heart had once been. “Was he lame?”

Ronan looked down his nose at Adam, pupil blown eyes hooded and dangerous and mocking. “He looked at me the wrong way. It’s not a good idea to look at Ronan Lynch the wrong way.”

But the voice was all wrong, rife with tremors and remorse, and something else, something so uncertain that Adam felt a pang of guilt for ever thinking Ronan Lynch a careless, heartless beast. 

Adam felt he should say something, felt this moment was open for some measure of compassion, but Adam was sorely lacking in expressive compassion. Besides, Ronan, though maybe not as heartless as Adam may have once believed, didn’t seem the type of man who could use any measure of pity. Adam didn’t want to disappoint, and so he remained quiet, just watched, let the quiet become the comfort.

Ronan turned his head to the side, watched the twisting grains in the wooden floor. “In France…” he said, then trailed off. Adam felt his pulse spike. He knew that Ronan didn’t talk about the war, didn’t talk about anything. That was common knowledge at The Garrison. That was common knowledge in Birmingham. Adam knew, if he moved too quickly now, or spoke, the spell would break, and Ronan would scurry back into his hole.

“In France,” he continued, slow, unsure, “I got used to seeing men die. Never got used to seeing horses die.”

Ronan swallowed, then tugged at the end of his cigarette with a desperation Adam hadn’t expected. 

He felt the world tipping somewhere dangerous. Felt it was his job to reroute them, the both of them. “I found something to wear,” he chirped. “For the race. Are you talking about Cheltenham? That will be very grand.”

Ronan blinked, looked up at Adam. A fog moved from in front of his eyes as he focused again. “The King will be there,” Ronan said.

“King George?” Adam couldn’t help the spike of excitement at being in the same place as the King of the Empire.

Ronan smirked. “No. King Joseph Kavinsky and all his merry men.”

Kazinsky. Adam knew that name. Barrington warned him about Kavinsky. They weren’t merry men, from what he could recall, but rabid dogs. All of them.

“And why are you bringing me? What will you have me do?”

“For two pounds, you’ll do what I say.”

“I want three.” Adam sat straighter. If he was being tossed into the lion’s den, he wanted more than the pittance Ronan was throwing at him. Ronan’s mouth twitched. It was a pleasant thing to look at, however odd. “And I want to sing here. That’s part of the deal now.”

“Since when?”

“Since you nearly smiled.”

Ronan’s face shuddered. The small, upturn at his mouth became a straight line again, and his eyes fogged over like they’d been just moments ago. Adam felt the line slipping from his fingers. 

“Once a week,” he urged, sitting forward. “Simple, easy. We’ll sing just like we did in Dublin.”

“You aren’t from Dublin, so don’t lie to me.” A knife, sharp, quick, painful. Adam couldn’t breath.

“I asked around. I have family over there. No one’s heard of that pub you say you used to work at.” Adam cursed Harry for sharing his papers with Ronan. But what else was Harry to do? Whatever was happening tonight, Adam needed to remember that Ronan was not to be trusted. Ronan was dangerous. Ronan might already know. “If I had to guess, you’re a boy from a bad family who got a girl from a good family pregnant.”

And just like that, the line was in Adam’s hand again. He didn’t mind lying, if it meant to save his neck. If it meant to keep him safe. If it meant keeping Ronan Lynch in the dark about his true identity. 

Adam dropped his gaze to his hands again, an act he hoped looked shamed, embarrassed, even. They weren’t hard looks to muster; he wore them well.

“You ran away, didn’t you?” When Adam didn’t speak, could only shake his head _yes_ , Ronan let out a satisfied little sigh. “So I’m right and my mother is wrong.”

“Right about what?” Adam asked, suddenly angry. He searched Ronan’s face, passive and cold once more. 

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Looks like it matters to you.”

“Family business.” _Oh._

Adam cast his eyes down again. “You won’t tell my secret?” he asked, quiet.

“Do you think I tell people things?” Adam shook his head again, looked up. Ronan was watching him, curious, curious, curious. Then, against all odds, “What do you sing?”

“Anything,” Adam said, perhaps too eagerly.

Ronan slapped his hand on the wooden table. “Up on a chair, then.”

And then it was Adam standing on a chair in the middle of the pub, Ronan’s chair pulled up close to watch. Something fiery coursed through him at the appraisal, at the thought he’d actually get his way with something asked of Ronan Lynch.

He forced himself not to smile. Not too wide, at least.

“Happy or sad?” he asked.

Ronan blinked. Took a pull from his cigarette. “Sad.”

“Okay,” Adam adjusted his stance on the chair, “but I warn you, it’ll break your heart.”

Ronan’s eyes fluttered closed, the briefest respite from the world, and then he swallowed, opened his eyes. Shook his head. “Already broken.”

And so Adam sang.

_In a neat little town they called Belfast_  
_Apprentice to trade I was bound_  
_And many an hour's sweet happiness_  
_Have I spent in that neat little town_  
_As sad misfortune came over me_  
_Which caused me to stray from the land_  
_Far away from me friends and relations_  
_Betrayed by the black velvet band_  
_Her eyes they shown like diamonds_  
_I thought her the queen of the land_  
_And her hair, it hung over her shoulder_  
_Tied up with a black velvet band._  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yay! what do you think?
> 
> unbeta'd. find me on [tumblr](https://onthesea-mystery.tumblr.com/)!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw; slurs in the first part, some minor violence towards the end.

_Down the dark streets, the houses looked the same_  
_Getting darker now, faces look the same_  
_And I walked round and round_  
  
Interzone — Joy Division

—

They were in the snug, the four of them, playing cards and wrestling bits of local gossip from one another, Declan drunk as usual and Matthew, silly and youthful, begging for a swig of whiskey from Ronan’s glass.

Gansey smacked the back of Matthew’s head and handed him a lager, instead. Ronan felt he might smile, somewhere in the midst of the evening, feeling freer than he had in ages. It was Saturday, and therefore there was singing. From the bar, Adam’s soothing lilt muddled pleasantly with the gruff, out of tune voices of the locals. It helped that there was always plenty to drink and plenty to smoke.

It was a rare thing to see Ronan Lynch happy, and yet a stormy, midnight song from a beautiful man did wonders for the wicked. 

Gansey was just laughing at him, plucking the very whiskey he denied Matthew out of Ronan’s grip and drinking it all himself, laughing that _fast women and slow horses will ruin your life!_ when the gun shot came from outside the door of the snug.

The four of them stilled. 

Through the door, “I’m looking for a man named Lynch!”

Ronan stood, looked at Matthew, “Go home.” To Gansey and Declan, he indicated for them to follow. 

Another gun shot rattled from the pub proper. “I SAID!” The voice was notably masculine, if not a bit hysterical, “I’m looking for a man named Lynch.”

Ronan open the door to the pub.

In the middle of the room stood a man, short and slender with troublesome eyes. He was a small thing, surrounded by the weary eyes of The Garrison’s patrons and his own, wild pack of men, but his eyes, near black and horribly sunken, spoke of instability of the acutest kind.

He turned at the sound of the door, a slow curve of his back, chin over shoulder, until flinty, midnight eyes met Ronan’s own. 

The man’s mouth twisted into something cruel. 

“Harry,” Ronan said, unblinking, eyes cascading along the scars and cuts and bruises along Joseph Kavinsky’s face and neck, “get this man a drink. Everyone else, out.”

Only once did Ronan let his eyes stray from Kavinsky, to find Adam’s slight form hovering at the opening behind the bar. “You,” he said, “go home.”

There was muted shuffling around them, Ronan and his blinders, Kavinsky and his dogs, The Garrison emptying itself out quickly, a silence much like men running from mounted guns. And yet, Adam hovered. His face had taken on a steely look, slow, measured blinking, shoulders squared as if he planned to defy Ronan. 

“I said go home,” Ronan all but whispered. Adam hovered only a second longer, then tossed his rag onto the bar and followed the rest of the crowd escaping outside.

He turned back to Kavinsky. 

Kavinsky was a slow thing, like molasses dripping from a knot in a tree, and yet as slippery as a snake. Ronan had the distinct impression that if he were to run his hand along the gaunt curve in Kavinsky’s neck, it would turn black as oil, stained and reeking and evasive.

Kavinsky handed his pistol to one of his men.

“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Kavinsky?” Ronan asked.

And there, a grin, tight and skeletal, but wide, wide, wide, two yellow rows stacked one on top of the other, lips pulled taut, pale pink and chapped, white rimmed. 

“I like it when you call me _Mr. Kavinsky_ ,” he said, slipping closer, closer, closer to Ronan. His skin smelled like oil and damp earth, Ronan realized, however pallid he was. Ronan hated that the scent of oil and earth was enough to make his pulse sing.

Ronan swallowed. Kavinsky licked his over-chapped lips, watched in earnest as Ronan’s adams apple bobbed up and down.

Harry appeared then, placed one bottle of whiskey on a table nearby, with four accompanying glasses. 

Ronan went behind the table and sat, never taking his eyes off Kavinsky. Gansey and Declan mimicked him, accepted their glasses of whiskey when Ronan slid them their way. 

Kavinsky didn’t move from him spot in center of the room, but Ronan poured him a measure of whiskey all the same, slid it over the length of the table towards him. 

Kavinsky watched Ronan with twisted interest. He then took two steps forward, ripped the whiskey off the table and slammed it back. He licked his lips, eyes glinting and unmoving from Ronan’s. 

And then he leaned forward, right over the small circular table, grabbed the bottle of whiskey from in front of Ronan, and tugged on it directly from the neck. It was an endless display, lucid and vulgar, brown liquid circling in the neck of the bottle and disappearing into Kavinsky’s mouth. 

Finished, he let out a loud growl and thrust the now half-full bottle across the room, shattering against an opposite wall. 

Declan flinched, and Ronan hated him for it.

“Right,” Kavinsky hissed, lips still slick with liquor, body still folded over the table, so close that Ronan could practically taste the whiskey in the air, “I never heard of you, and then I did hear of you. Some little diddicoy razor gang thinks they can fuck me over? 

This near, it was impossible to miss the thin scar that stretched from behind Kavinsky’s left ear down the length of his neck and under the open collar of his shirt. It was pink and puckered and horribly new. 

“You have,” Kavinsky spit, “my undivided attention.”

His eyes skipped along the three of them, Gansey first, then Declan, and then finally Ronan. He licked his lips. “I’m told the boss is called Ronan and I’m guessing that’s you because you’re looking me up and down like a bitch in heat.”

Declan snarled and nearly lunged out of his chair and across the table, but Gansey wrapped his arms around his shoulders and held him back. 

Kavinsky tossed his head back and laughed, manic and unhinged. He looked thoroughly uncontrollable and Ronan had the unhelpful inclination to reach out, run the pad of his thumb along the length of the scar on his neck.

Instead, he just said, “I want to know what you want.”

Kavinsky never stilled, just cackled endlessly, a rabid hyaena. Behind him, a tall, inscrutable man cleared his throat. 

“There have been suspicious betting patterns on a horse named Monaghan Boy at Kempton Park,” the man said. He was wiry and dark haired, calm in places Kavinsky was not. Ronan’s eyes unwillingly shifted to him. 

“Suspicious?” Declan spat, contemptible. Ronan nearly punched him then and there.

“Won by a length twice then finished last with 4,000 pounds bet on him.” The man pulled off his glasses, cleaned them methodically on a handkerchief. 

“I’m sorry,” Ronan said, sitting back, crossing one leg over the other. “But who am I talking to here?” His eyes darted between Kavinsky and the inscrutable man.

“My name is Swan and I am Mr. Kavinsky’s advisor.”

“Right, right, RIGHT!” Kavinsky was no longer laughing. His face, once white, near translucent, was red and bulging, a single vein on his temple a purple streak against his flesh. “Fuck the parley. You gyspy scum fixed a race without my permission. I’m Joseph fucking Kavinsky and I run the races so I’m gonna have you shot against a fucking post!”

His cheeks fluttered woefully. 

Ronan shifted his head to the side minutely, tempered his frantically beating heart. He’d always heard of Kavinsky’s mania, but seeing it up close was something else. Exhilarating, perhaps.

“And you,” Kavinsky growled, low, low, low, reaching out and grasping Ronan’s chin in his hand, twisting his face so their eyes met again. Ronan swallowed, willed himself not to wrap his own hand around Kavinsky’s wrist and _twist_ until the bone snapped in two. “I don’t care how pretty your fucking eyes are, you’re going first.”

Kavinsky snapped his free hand and waved it behind his back. A man stepped forward, gun pulled from the pocket of his coat, and handed it over to Kavinsky, who weighed it in his palm before pressing the barrel to the center of Ronan’s forehead.

“Ronan.” Declan made to lunge again, but Gansey held him tight.

Ronan blinked, slow. Licked his lips. He didn’t miss how Kavinky’s eyes followed the movement. 

“Mr. Kavinsky,” he whispered, faint and breathless, and yes, _yes, _there it was. A single moment of uncertainty, _desire,___ even. The gun dropped away. Ronan took his chance, reached into his pocket and pulled a single bullet out and place it on the table in front of him. “Look at that. It has my name on it.”

Kavinsky picked up the bullet, rolled it between his fingers.

“You’re at war with the Sargent’s yourself, Mr. Kavinsky,” Ronan continued. “They attack your bookies and take your money. Your men can’t control them.”

“It might be in our interest to listen to what Mr. Lynch has to say,” came Swan’s pacifying tone.

Kavinsky still inspected the bullet, held it up to a lamp, watched the orange glint across rusted silver. 

Ronan stood, then, and moved around the table towards him. A few feet away, he paused, hands in his pockets. “The Sargent’s say your tracks are easy pickings, your police easy to buy.” Kavinsky slanted him a look, long and darkly appraising. “We know how they work. We have muscle. Together we may defeat them.”

Kavinsky turned, tossed the bullet up and down in his hand, stepped close. They were nearly nose to nose.

“Mr. Kavinsky, perhaps we should schedule a secondary parley.” Swan again, somewhere on the fringes, melting into the stilted silence. Ronan didn’t care, really, who was here, now, or where he was, for that matter. Kavinsky was so close, his eyes too dark. This was a precipice. This was a war zone.

“I admire you, Mr. Kavinsky,” Ronan heard himself say. It was quiet, just for the two of them. “Came from nothing. Built your business from the ground up. It would be a pleasure to work with you.”

The word _pleasure_ echoed against the chambers of his skull and Ronan thought of the last time he’d ever felt anything remotely pleasing. Before France, maybe, certainly not after, not even considering Noah. It was hard to work himself into that place, to allow himself to feel anything past the ebbing vacuum, the pitted black of his soul. His body was a formality, anymore, a vessel for his brain and his functions, a husk, dead and dried and deteriorating. 

Somehow, against odds, against even _ration_ , something stirred in Ronan, something unfriendly, yes, and yet funnily enough, _gratifying_ , as if the thought of Joseph Kavinsky putting the barrel of a gun past his willing lips was the only pin prick in the vast, endless agony worth holding on to. 

_Pleasure._

Ronan’s eyelids drooped slightly, waiting.

Kavinsky reached up, then, took Ronan’s chin in his hand again, thumb pressing and pressing into his jaw line, squeezing. Ronan knew he’d have a bruise there, tomorrow, and somehow it didn’t matter.

“No one works _with_ me, no matter how pleasurable it may be.” He licked the words right out of his mouth. It was horribly profane. “People work _for_ me.”

Kavinsky squeezed harder at his jaw, pressing Ronan’s mouth until his lips popped open. Somewhere, behind them, near, wherever, shuffling and grunting and Ronan knew it was Declan again, attempting to wrestle his way from Gansey’s grip. It was a distant thought, when it came, but he was pleased that Gansey never once questioned him, in this moment. 

Kavinsky raised the hand holding the bullet and put it in the space between Ronan’s two lips. Reflexively, Ronan closed his mouth around the shape of it, let his jaw relax. He felt his face heating under the implication, the audience, even, knowing his brothers were so close, and knowing neither he nor them could do anything to alter this moment.

Kavinsky was insatiable in his wants, something Ronan knew would both debase him and thrill him. 

But, at the end of the day, Ronan knew how to win a war.

“You look like a whore,” Kavinsky whispered, pushing Ronan away and turning, moving swift, swift, swift, away and towards the exit. 

Ronan remained a statue, watched Kavinsky and his men file from The Garrison. Only Swan remained, nodded at the three of them, “I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other again.” And then he was gone, too, and it was just the brothers. 

Silence.

Ronan spit the bullet from his mouth.

Declan was there, at his side. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” he growled.

Ronan sneered. He didn’t have time for Declan’s wounded pride. He had business to think of. He had to plan for the races. 

But it wasn’t over, the onslaught, because Gansey moved, slow, around the table, stood away from Ronan and Declan, but his presence was loud. The loudest. Hands shoved into pockets, chin tossed up antagonistically. When he spoke, it was firm. “You started a war with the Sargent’s on purpose, didn’t you?”

“What?” Declan growled next to him, but Ronan barely heard him. “You have lost your mind. You can’t take on Joseph Kavinsky!”

The bullet rolled in a feeble way across the floor until it spluttered to a stop. His ears flooded with it, the sensation, Kavinsky’s hand on his mouth, and also, _also_ , a song, sung just for him. It thrummed through him. A single world. _Pleasure._

—

It was nearly a week before Adam saw Ronan Lynch again.

It was jolting, as it always was, to see him walk through the large front doors of The Garrison. His skin was tremendously pale, but he had the faintest smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose. The rest of his features were dark, aside from the eyes, those piercing blue iris’s that seemed to find Adam in a crowd. Or maybe it was Adam who found _them_.

It was quiet today, as it often was at midday on a Tuesday, but those few patrons who were drinking at the bar moved away to tables to give Ronan his space. 

Ronan stood at the end of the bar near the door of the snug and watched Adam pulled a bucket of lager. 

Adam was sure he’d never get used to that gaze, the piercing, scrutinized shades of it, the way Ronan seemed to blink as if asking a question or, more likely, picking apart the pieces of your soul.

When Adam finished pulling the bucket of beer, he wiped his hands on a rag and moved slowly towards the end of the bar. 

They shared a heavy look, something hanging between them, unspoken, as if the storm from a over a week ago was nothing but a shared dream. Or nightmare, depending on how you looked at it.

Ronan broke the silence first. “Whiskey. Irish.” Adam put his rag over his shoulder. “Three glasses, please.”

Adam obliged, moved deftly around the bar, pulling three glasses and a full bottle of whiskey and placing them in front of Ronan. 

Ronan, as he was wont to do, put a small stack of coins on the bar top, slid them over to Adam. Adam, hearing Harry’s voice prickling in the back of his mind, ignored them.

“I’ve decide,” Adam said, at long last, “I’m not going to the races.”

Ronan shifted, squared his shoulders, did that thing he often did where he thrust out his chin, looked down at Adam from the length of his perfectly straight nose. 

“Is that so?”

“Not unless you pay me another two pounds ten shillings.” Adam picked up a glass from under the bar, wiped at it methodically with his rag. “Towards my suit.”

This was admittedly a cheap tactic, but coercion wasn’t beneath Adam. Not much was beneath Adam at all. 

Ronan blinked rapidly. Adam imagined he was trying to keep his cool. “I’ve already given you three.” 

“And how much will your suit cost?” Adam shot back, a tad unfriendly. He didn’t much like being made to feel a charity case. Was he supposed to get on his hands and knees and thank Ronan Lynch for his generous patronage when they both knew Ronan had more than enough money to front Adam’s entire wardrobe from now until he died? 

“I don’t pay for my suits,” Ronan volleyed back. And there, at the corner of his mouth, a twitch, as if he were holding back a grin or a smirk or a sneer.

Whatever it was, it was something. Adam hated that he felt proud for producing it. 

He put down his glass and picked up another one, wiping the sides. “So you want me to look like a choir boy.”

“It doesn’t matter what I want.” And back was the mask, steely and blue and foreboding. “It’s not me you’re dressing for.”

Adam felt his face heat, unbidden. Ronan must have noticed too—his eyebrow quirked curiously and his gaze fell to Adam’s lips, which Adam assumed were curled into an unattractive sneer.

Ronan looked like he might say something, then, his eyes suddenly foggy like they’d been the night they shared alone, in the storm, in the moment he talked of France. Adam felt himself leaning closer, unhinged, suddenly, from the knowledge that while he was to make himself close to Lynch, he was also to protect himself. 

_Danger, danger, danger._

But they were both saved as the doors to The Garrison opened again and two men entered, pausing only long enough to share a prolonged look with Ronan, before disappearing into the snug. 

Ronan grabbed the whiskey and the glasses and disappeared into the snug after them without so much as another look at Adam.

If Adam was alone in the bar, without the curious eyes of the patrons, he might have thrown the glass in his hand against the opposite wall.

Ronan Lynch was, in a word, infuriating. 

Mostly it was his disdain that irked Adam, the blatant disregard for feelings and decorum. But there was another part of Adam that found him infuriating for an entirely different reason, a reason he had yet to unpack in the privacy of his own bed. 

Ronan Lynch was an obscurity. Entirely unknowable. 

Perhaps that’s what drew Adam to him, like a ship lost in a wild sea, searching for a lighthouse through the raging waves. Ronan could be that beacon, sometimes, warm and calling, an oasis. But yet, he was most often the storm itself, the untamable rifting of waves, the crashing and colliding of salt and wash, cold and forbidding and deathly. 

Adam was still, as ever, just a ship, wooden and breakable and forever drifting. 

It made him want to scream.

And yet, fury aside, Adam had a job to do, and two men meeting privately with Ronan Lynch seemed to fit the exact description of what Adam was supposed to be looking for. 

Adam knew the snug was a desperately private place. The hard shutters at the end of the bar gave very little to be desired by way of eavesdropping, though it could never be said that Adam didn’t try.

He picked up his glassware and moved it to the end of the bar, making a show of spreading his work across the counter, moving back and forth and only occasionally passing the shutters of the snug so that no one might suspect him of listening in on Ronan Lynch’s private conversations. 

The small slip of paper with the gun’s serial numbers felt hot in his pocket, suddenly, as if it might burn it’s way through to his skin and imbed itself there, a tattoo for the whole world to see.

As Adam feigned working, he only caught bare snatches of their conversation, muffled and hardly discernible through the thick wood.

“ _…concerns the Monmouth factory…you know most of the paint shop there…_ ”

That voice wasn’t Ronan’s, though it was distinctly Irish. The conversation flowed onward. Adam strained his ears.

“ _…what business is that of mine?_ Ronan.

Another Irish voice. “ _Speculation from Monmouth that…Peaky Blinders took em…_ ” 

Adam nearly dropped the glass he was holding. Took _what?_

“ _…to learn the whereabouts…we’d pay good money…_ ”

“ _For whom do you speak?_ ”

Adam’s breathing stuttered, straining.

But, _no_ , someone waved to him from the other end of the bar. Adam’s heart palpitated unpleasantly as he moved away from the snug to pull a lager for an elderly gentleman. 

When he was back near the shutters, the conversation was gone, replaced by a loud, unyielding song, and paralyzingly familiar song.

_Oh, father why are you so sad_  
_On this bright Easter morn’_  
_When Irish men are proud and glad_  
_Of the land that they were born?_  
_Oh, son, I see in mem’ries few_  
_Of far off distant days_  
_When being just a lad like you_  
_I joined the IRA_  


_The IRA._

It pinged around in Adam’s mind recklessly, knowing two IRA men shared a room with Ronan Lynch. It felt strangely like betrayal.

Barrington oft reminded Adam of his feelings towards his father, and Adam assumed it was a way to force Adam to check his bias. Clouded judgement wasn’t really judgement, now was it? 

But when it came to his father, it wasn’t just his judgement that was clouded, but everything else, too, his morals and his wants and his needs, _everything_ , until he became the cloud itself, until Adam was nothing but a raging, pitch black storm, searching and searching and striking with a vengeance unbound. 

His father had been in the IRA. Still was, as far as Adam was concerned. And it was impossible, really, to separate the man from the organization. Adam didn’t want to, anyway. It was easier to justify hate with the weight of an institution behind it.

Besides, with Irish, it was all very close. Two men speaking for the IRA might mean they were related to his father, or knew of him, at least.

The possibility was a live wire in him, connected to some deep tissued desire for full revenge. 

It shook him, to see the pair of them leave the snug, followed by Adam’s true quarry, handshakes shared between men, promises of business and cooperation in the future.

Ronan was laughing to himself, watching the backs of the IRA men leave through the front doors. 

Adam’s hands were shaking, and so he placed the glass he was holding back on the bar, turned from the door so Ronan wouldn’t see his face. 

A stillness overcame the bar. Adam assumed Ronan left, followed the men out and left him to collect himself. 

But no, there was his voice. 

“Where were we?” Ronan sounded like he was smiling, like he was picking up the strand of their previous conversation.

For some unimaginable reason, this irked Adam.

“I thought you only _allowed_ singing on Saturdays.” Adam knew sounded put out, but he was shaken, still, to come in such close contact with men he’d sworn to hate, however irrational his collective hate was. It wound and unwound itself in his gut. 

He knew that turning around, facing Ronan, would only bare the redness of his face, the dark, glinting of his eyes. 

The moment dragged on. Adam pulled the cloth from over his shoulder and ran his hands through it to have something to do.

Finally, _finally_ , as if Adam was waiting for a reason not to hate Ronan Lynch, “I use whiskey as proofing water.” It was said conversationally, that was certain, but it was surprisingly tentative, as if Ronan sensed the unspoken discomfort, as if he were peeking over the wall Adam erected around himself.

Adam looked over his shoulder. 

“They’re only rebels because they like the songs,” Ronan continued. As if that made Adam feel any better.

And yet, he was measurably more calm, now that it was just the two of them again. He almost smiled, but tamped to down. 

“I’m surprised you could even understand them,” Adam said, picking up another glass, just holding it between his hands, “given how strong their accents are. Next time I could translate for you.”

There, _then_ he smiled. Small. It felt right, and natural, however sudden it manifested. 

It must have been the right choice, because Ronan stood up straighter, almost smiled again, given the sudden twinkling of his crystalline eyes. “You’d work for me.” A statement. 

Adam breathed in through the nose. “Aren’t I already?”

“So you _are_ coming to the races.” Another statement, this time accompanied by an almost unnoticeable twitch of the lips. “Right then.”

Ronan reached into his pocket, withdrew a wallet, and pulled out three coins. He tipped them onto the bar. “There’s your two pounds ten shillings.”

As much as Adam hated to admit it, the true victory was nearly making Ronan Lynch smile twice in an afternoon.

—

He probably shouldn’t have, but Adam sorely lacked in self-preservation. Besides, the buzzing in his ear, the one that sounded a lot like _The Irish Republican Army_ whispered on repeat, had yet to dwindle.

Once Ronan left, which wasn’t long after giving Adam money towards his new suit, Adam closed The Garrison and took off after the two IRA members. 

If he had been thinking clearly, he might have concocted and entire list against doing such a thing, like the potential reprimand from Harry for abandoning the pub mid afternoon, or even the reprimand from Barrington for going after two potential Fenians without any backup.

He felt the weight of the pistol strapped to his leg—it might have been a comfort any other time, but Adam’s mind was thick with static and the reverberations of his appetite. 

Being in the same room with Ronan Lynch for any amount of time at all, really, only exacerbated how foggy he felt, overcome with desire to know those two men, to find out where they came from and who they knew, how and why they came searching for Peaky Blinders and whatever they though they were selling. 

Ronan Lynch was like a field of red poppies; alluring and disarming at the same time.

But it was easy blaming Ronan for spurring Adam’s ill-advised and admittedly destructive plan. If Adam told himself that this pursuit was for the investigation at large, then he didn’t feel too afraid, or too guilty. 

It was easy to find them in the overcrowded, over-loud lanes. They moved slowly, staggering, hazy with drink and adrenaline. 

Adam kept his distance, watching, glad for the drab gray of his trousers and yellow tinge to his shirt. He felt invisible, but in an intentional sort of way. Somehow, that made it better.

He followed them to Sparkbrook, the Irish neighborhood. 

It was different there, maybe not in appearance, but in sensation. 

Adam felt at once that he belonged and that he was intruding. The faces and shapes of the people he passed, their voices, lilting and familiar, filled him with nostalgia, but the suspicion was not to be missed. 

They watched him and he felt it, prickling and cold on the back of his neck. He was an outsider here.

At a fork in the lane, the men said their goodbyes to one another and went separate ways. Adam hesitated only briefly, deciding it was in his best interest to follow the older of the two—besides, the man turned down a quiet alley, where windows and sunlight were sparse. Adam sensed an advantage.

He continued, closer now, quiet and keeping to the shadows as his training had prepared him for. 

Washing hung between the buildings, long sheets clinging to string, night clothes pulsing in the weak breeze. Adam watched the man push between the linens, weaving further and further into the depths of the alley.

And then, the man was gone and Adam was alone. 

Adam slowed, realizing the sudden quiet. 

He bent forward, fingering at the leg of his trouser, reaching, searching for the elastic to release his pistol…

But then his head met stone, air rushed from out of him, and a body pressed into him so hard he could barely breath.

“Think you could follow me, laddie?” The man breathed into his ear. His breath was fetid and hot and Adam felt bile rise up in him. 

Then, a gun poked into his stomach.

“Who do you work for, boy?” the man asked, pressing the gun further into Adam’s stomach. Adam could barely breathe. “I said, who do you work for? Answer me or I’ll spill your guts onto the gravel.”

“No..no one,” Adam finally managed, a whisper.

“You think I’ll believe you’re just a whore?” The gun pressed deeper, harder. The tip of it was warm, burning, singeing it’s way through the fabric of Adam’s shirt. “Tell me.”

The gun cocked in slow motion.

Adam moved.

A shot rang out, echoing against the cold stone buildings, but it wasn’t Adam’s guts in the gravel. The man lay there, twitching and bleeding and finally, finally, gasping into nothing.

Adam watched the life fade from him, pistol and arm collapsing at his side. The last of the man’s essence shivered out of his limbs until there was nothing but a hunk of meat left to rot in the lane. 

Adam felt it. It wasn’t a quickness, but a slow, creeping, horror. 

Adam was a killer, now. Victim number one lay at his feet.

The bile was back, a reckoning. It overcame him and he vomited against the brick wall. 

A sound at the end of the alley, a man, singing, drunken and rowdy, was the thing that roused him, forced him out the opposite end of the alley and into the canals. 

And then it was with a certainty that hatred welled up in him. He was no better than those Fenians. He was just a man bottled and brewed for anger and violence. A monster, just like his father.

Just like Ronan Lynch and his brothers and those Peaky Blinder bastards.

Just like the Bolsheviks and the rest of the scum that infested the streets of Birmingham. 

Adam was no better, just then, huddling and shaking and sweating in one reeking tunnel cut out from the canal way. 

The hatred swelled, clogged him up. It felt like it used to feel back in Ireland, before he ran away from home, before he’d gotten sick of his father’s fists and the way his mother stared blankly at their peeling wallpaper. 

It was so much a part of him, he realized, that he knew, without a doubt, he’d never be able to shake it. 

Once an animal, always an animal. Adam felt it fit into him like a knife. 

He choked down a sob.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3 hope you enjoyed. [tumblr](https://onthesea-mystery.tumblr.com/).


	8. Chapter 8

_Here stands a man_  
_With a bullet in his clenched right hand_  
_Don't push him son_  
_For he's got the power to crush this land_  
_Oh hear, hear him cry, boy_  
  
The War — SYML

—

“Are you armed?”

Ronan hesitated in the doorway of the small sitting room in their house on Watery Lane. 

His mother hovered by the hearth, cigarette in one hand, the other wrapped tight around her middle. She looked into the smoldering embers, unblinking and focused.

“No,” he said, stepping into the room and pulling off his cap. He supposed he wasn’t armed, aside from the razors sewn into his cap, but he also supposed that wasn’t what his mother was asking about.

In the tinging darkness, the matted red and gold light, Aurora’s face was an unfamiliar and shadowy thing. He wondered how long she’d been standing there for, if she’d been waiting for him all this time, or if he happened upon her just as she needed him.

She took a long drag of her cigarette. “Then I’ll tell you.”

Ronan titled his chin up at her back, watched the straight line of her tension fold as she bent next to the fire, tossed her cigarette into the dying flames.

She wrapped her arms around her legs, then, and she looked very much like a little girl.

“Opal and Henry were married today,” she said into the flames, as if the fire would answer some unsolvable riddle, as if avoiding Ronan’s eye might stop him from truly hearing what she told him.

But Ronan heard. He heard and he felt and it sunk into him like the cold point of an icicle. He threw his cap against the opposite wall, a sudden, uncontrollable rage rippling through him.

“I’ll handle it,” Aurora said, standing, finally, looking at him, sensing the stampede in his blood stream. Wittingly, or perhaps not, she stepped between him and the door. 

“Where are they?” he seethed.

“They haven’t left the city,” she whispered, consoling, perhaps knowing his fear, perhaps having the same fear of her own. 

Opal married meant many things, none of which were good. Opal married to Henry Cheng, noted Bolshevik and general piece of shit only exacerbated the bleakness of their situation. It meant Russia and revolution and starvation and death and never seeing his sister again. It meant the end of innocence. It meant a sudden and unfavorable break in the Lynch family. 

“She’s not even eighteen,” he growled, as if that was enough to convey the sense of betrayal he felt at Opal’s rebelliousness, her inability to see deceit when it was right in front of her. 

“They are still in Birmingham,” she repeated, “and I’ll take care of it.”

Ronan slammed his fist against the nearest wall.

“He’s using her,” he barked, ignoring the swell of his knuckles, the warmth trickling there, the red dripping into his trousers. “You realize that, don’t you?”

He stalked towards his mother, until they were nose to nose. She put a single, steadying hand on his chest, to hold him back. “It’s as simple as her last name,” he whispered into their shared space. “He wants the guns.”

But it felt like it was more than the guns. It felt acutely of betrayal, of years of untruths and half hidden motives, years of lost friendship and a sister growing too old too quickly, suddenly able to think for herself and defy the unsaid rules. It felt like losing control. It felt, however irrationally, like the end. 

The emotion swam through him, nostrils flaring, chest rising and falling. 

Aurora watched him closely, let her hand rub small, soothing circles on his chest. “If you let me deal with it,” she whispered, “it’ll end it peace.”

“Get him out of town,” Ronan blinked, looked over his mother’s shoulder, let his mind and body elevate and twist him somewhere else, somewhere far away, “or I’ll deal with him myself.”

And there was a promise there, seeped in blood and mud and screams that came from the ground.

“You’ve had more than enough war to last a lifetime,” his mother said from somewhere, her voice tethered to the earth, her voice fading and shrinking as the desire for his pipe took hold, as he stormed away from her and climbed the stairs to his room.

—

It was grey and dreary and Adam felt rain in the air.

He stood with a single shoulder against a column in the portico enveloping the exterior sculpture garden. He was silently grateful for the solitude afforded by the poor weather, though knew his solace would be short lived.

From across the cobbled courtyard, he could just see within the dark, cool interior of the museum. A few shadows moved past the open archways, the more curious museum patrons poking their head out to see if it was worth a jaunt into the oncoming rain to enjoy the sculpture selection. 

He felt uneasy, suddenly, as a figured moved swiftly from within the museum, a solid purpose to their step as they came through the archway outside, abandoned the cover of the portico and into the newly started rain, across the courtyard to exactly where Adam pressed against the column. 

“You had no business,” Chief Inspector Barrington Whelk growled, getting cover under Adam’s section of the portico. “Your remit is clear. Observe and report. That is it.”

Adam closed his eyes. The rain was louder, he thought, with his eyes closed, and he could hardly feel Barrington’s presence at all, the entire raging fury of it.

He could hardly feel his own guilt, the one that seeped into him so deep he could hardly sleep anymore, not that he slept often anyway. 

_Murderer._

The word hung between the two men. He knew Barrington would never say it out loud, would never address it head on, and yet it was a very real thing, as if the body was splayed between their feet, as if they could smell the rot of the flesh then and there. 

“I needed to know where he lived,” Adam heard himself say. The words came out muted and toneless, abutted against the beautiful smattering of rain on stone.

“You have been warned,” Barrington scolded, “about your history. You went after him because he was IRA.”

“He had information,” Adam growled back, opening his eyes and whipping his head to find Barrington. It was a small blessing, the rain, leaving the sculpture garden blessedly unused, blessedly private.

Barrington stood very close to Adam. He hadn’t bother removing his hat or gloves. 

Adam watched him flex his hands once, then again, nostril’s flaring unattractively as he searched for the next thing to say, the next way to reprimand Adam for his actions.

Adam supposed it was only right, this dressing down. He blatantly disregarded his orders. He let his judgement become clouded. He let his hatred for his father, his annoyance at Ronan Lynch, and the general sense of his uselessness propel him into, perhaps, one of the more dangerous neighborhoods of Birmingham, after a man he had no intel on. He had been blind, in that alley, and very lucky indeed when it was his gun that ended up being the faster of two.

But Barrington did not look disappointed, necessarily, not in the way a superior might be towards their subordinate. He looked _worried_ , an all encompassing distress that Adam couldn’t place. It irked him, he realized, that Barrington was acting out at him, out of character and out of his own position. 

Adam felt cornered by the sudden tension. 

“I should take you out of The Garrison,” Barrington mused.

“No,” Adam all but pleaded. “It’s Cheltenham on Friday.”

And that, Adam knew, was key. Or at least he fooled himself into believe it to be so. 

Besides, getting _close_ to Ronan Lynch had been a clear order. If Adam backed out of Cheltenham now…

“You have taken too much on,” Barrington insisted, stepping, if at all possible, closer. Adam felt their jacket’s touch.

Adam stepped away. “This is an active military mission,” he said, feeling the rain against the back of his bare neck.

“He was a Fenian, hardly an important one either,” Barrington professed, the change of conversation and the fact that he stepped closer to Adam again was both startling and uncomfortable, “but it’s not his death that worries me. It is your safety. Killing affects the heart, Adam.”

Adam looked around. The courtyard and it’s surrounding portico were empty, still, the rain their only company. Once grateful for the privacy, Adam now felt his comfort fleeing. 

“You assume too much, Chief Inspector,” Adam’s tone was again lifeless. He stepped away. “Just because I have no relationship with my father does not mean I am looking for you to take his place.”

Barrington’s face changed, then, shuttered itself. Where once his eyes were alive and frantic and… _hopeful_ , they were now dull and empty. He stepped back. 

“I’m doing my job,” Adam continued, when the silence became heavy with all the unwanted and unsaid things between them. “And I’ll be late for work.”

He turned and fled across the courtyard. He felt Barrington’s expectant gaze on his back the entire way.

—

The sounds of a riot woke him from his stupor.

He was laid lengthwise across his bed, feet and head hanging off opposite sides. 

Slowly he righted himself, ran a soothing hand over the aching muscles in his neck and shoulders. He was still dressed, he noticed, even had his shoes on, which was a small victory. It was nearly evening, now, and he was expected at the pub by dark for a evening of drinking with his brothers.

Cries and anger and anguish rang from the streets below. Factory horns blared. Somewhere, a window was smashed in.

Ronan rose, made his way to the single window in his room, ignored the dull throbbing at the front of his head and the sickly taste in his mouth. 

Outside was the makings of a factory rally. Coppers on horse back chased the strikers through the streets and alleys. The factory horned blared again just as his bedroom door rattled with a loud knock.

“Who is it?” he called, not turning away from the window, watching as three coppers pummeled a man into a puddle of sewage. 

“It’s me,” came Gansey’s voice through the door. He sounded tired, or perhaps drunk.

“Come in,” he called, turning.

Gansey entered and his eyes immediately fell to the pipe on his bedside table. Ronan raised his eyebrows, dared Gansey to say anything, knowing he never would. They had many fights about the drinking and the smoking and all the rest of it. It was easier, really, if Gansey just let it be. For the most part, he did.

Ronan walked across the room and shut the pipe away, Gansey watching him the whole time.

Only when the pipe was away, tucked under his mattress, did the tension seep from Gansey’s shoulders.

“What’s going on?” Ronan asked, sitting on the edge of the mattress.

“Sounds like the police raided a factory rally. Do you think Cheng’s back?”

So Gansey didn’t know.

“Cheng’s back,” Ronan confirmed, closing his eyes, grateful to feel the dip in the mattress next to him. “He’s with Opal. Their hiding in one of those commie rat holes.”

“Why’s Opal with Henry fucking Cheng?”

Ronan opened his eyes slowly. The door leading out to the hallway sat in front of him, but he could sense Gansey’s eyes on his profile. Slowly, he turned to meet his brother’s gaze. “Opal and Henry have been married.”

Shock flickered to life on Gansey’s face, then fueled itself with a flare of anger. Ronan was always amazed at how expressive Gansey’s eyes could be. He couldn’t lie, not if he tried.

Gansey stood, started pacing the tiny space from wall to wall. Ronan watched him curiously. He felt the same anger and the same shock, but it was duller now, lessened by the drug and the sleep and the time. 

“I just want to know where she is,” Ronan said after a time. Gansey stopped pacing and looked out the window.

“Ask mum,” he said.

Ronan clucked his tongue, laughed bitterly. Gansey looked over his shoulder.

“Or Cheng,” Ronan continued. “I’d like to know where Cheng is too.”

Gansey swallowed, knowing Ronan was asking him to search for the pair of them. It was only a moment before Gansey nodded, turned back to the window.

“Why are you here?” Ronan asked, eventually. 

Gansey’s shoulder tensed again, eyes dancing back and forth, following the anger in the streets. “You better talk to Declan.”

“What’s wrong with bloody Declan?”

Without turning around, “He has the Flanders Blues again.”

—

It was dark by the time Ronan arrived at St. Agnes.

Candle light, hazy yellow, cast against walls and into the vaulted ceilings.

It was empty aside from Declan’s crumpled form in one of the pews. 

Ronan approached slowly. 

On the pew next to his brother sat an empty bottle of whiskey. Ronan moved it and sat. 

Declan looked up. His face was red and swollen, deep black bruises below each eye, a long, purple vein pulsing against his temple. His eyes were bloodshot, pupils wide and black and consuming. 

“People keep asking me questions I don’t know the answers to,” Declan muttered, words slurred with drink and sorrow. “ _Is it true your Opal got married?_ I say…I don’t know. _Where’s she living now_? I say…I don’t know.”

He paused. Ronan swallowed. 

“ _Declan,_ they say, _who killed the paddy from Sparkbrook_? I say _what paddy?_. They say,” and then he shifted, so his chest was nearly touching Ronan’s chest, so their noses brushed, and his voice dropped to something unfamiliar, something unfriendly, “ _is it you Peaky Blinders who stole the guns from Monmouth_?”

Ronan pulled away, let the air rush from his lungs. Declan wasn’t supposed to know, now or ever. It was bad enough that Gansey knew, and their mother knew, and even bloody Helen knew. But Declan was a different beast entirely. He was unpredictable. He lacked both tact and forethought. And, as he was right to believe, Declan thought Ronan hated him. It made for an unhelpful mess.

“What guns, Ronan?” Declan near sobbed, the drink getting the best of him, the unfamiliar and dangerous tone replaced with something almost pitiful. “What bloody guns?”

“I was going to tell you.”

“Fuck you!” Declan lunged, wrapped a hang around the collar of Ronan’s shirt, twisting and suffocating.

But Ronan was faster, perhaps not stronger, but Declan was drunk. Ronan took both Declan’s hands in his own and pulled them away, but didn’t let go. “I was going to tell you,” he said again, stronger this time, closer. “You’ve had it rough these past few years, god knows you have.”

Declan sagged against him, choked on what sounded like aborted sobs.

“We’ve had some bloody luck,” he whispered it directly into Declan’s ear. “Fell off a wagon and into our laps. It’s us that has the guns and them that’s in the mud.”

Declan looked up, then, eyes shiny and face slick. He looked at Ronan with a sense of reverence, something so close to trust it hit Ronan, hard, in the center of his chest.

“Come with me,” Ronan said, impulsively. “I have something for you.”

—

They all had the Flanders Blues sometimes. Not one man returned from France untouched. Some men found ways to control it, whether with their drink or their pipe. Others, like Declan, let it become them until all that was left was mania and rage, distrust and fear.

In the few years after the war, in the time they all learned of their father’s abandonment and their slow reclamation of territory from rival gangs, Ronan learned how to manage and manipulate Declan’s mood swings. 

Ronan usually hated when Declan drank; he became unmanageable and vicious and downright stupid, nothing more than two fists and enough brawn to take on the entirety of Birmingham.

Other times, it was the drink Ronan hoped for, because sometimes, against all odds, against every statistical likelihood, Declan’s fear and anger could be manipulated into loyalty and brotherly love.

The pair of them entered The Garrison side by side. Much to Ronan’s personal annoyance, he noticed Adam almost immediately, hovering at the back of the pub, mop in hand, bucket at his feet, watching. Ronan swallowed. 

But Declan was there, and demanded attention as he always did. 

“You said you have something for me,” Declan said, words clinging together, still under the influence of his whiskey. “Where is she?”

Ronan barely held his smirk at bay, turned to look at his brother. 

Impulsive it may be, but Ronan knew this move would cement other things for him in the long run. Declan’s loyalty, for one, and an open avenue to transforming the family business into something legitimate, if they should ever want to.

“What did you always say when we were in France?” Ronan asked. Declan’s eyes glazed over, but he shook his head. “You always wanted to own your own pub.”

“You’ve gone soft,” Declan said around a sudden smile, a smile so new and so large, it nearly blinded Ronan. Ronan couldn’t help it; he smiled too. 

Declan spun on his heals, looked around The Garrison, the pub they came to know as home in the past years. It was large and welcoming, and always busy. 

“How do you know it’s for sale?” Declan asked, finally.

“Anything is for sale, for us,” Ronan said, clapping his brother on the shoulder, stepped closer. He could see Adam watching them closely from where he hovered int he back. It made the hair on Ronan’s neck stand on end. “We’re making too much money and we need a legitimate business to pass the money through.”

“I wouldn’t know where to start,” Declan admitted. Ronan shrugged.

“You spent two thirds of your life in pubs. Pour instead of drink.”

“But we can still drink, right?”

They migrated to the bar. “Your pub,” Ronan was still grinning and for some silly reason, though it didn’t seem to matter, “you do what you want.”

But then Harry was there, smiling at the pair of them. “What can I get for you gentleman?”

And Ronan took that silly smile of his and turned it into a smirk. He looked Harry in the eye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi there, sorry for the delay, hope you enjoy this chapter! 
> 
> Just wanted to make a note of a small edit I made! In Chapter 4, I incorrectly called the race that Ronan is taking Adam too "Kempton." Kempton is the name of the race track that Joseph Kavinsky owns, and Ronan is taking Adam to an event called Cheltenham, which takes place at Kempton. I went back and made that small correction, but wanted to clarify that for the sake of my own sanity!
> 
> & so you know, fun things, vERY fun things are on the horizon. As always, thank you for your support! Come find me on [tumblr](https://onthesea-mystery.tumblr.com/)<3

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for joining me in hell (: i'm obsessed with peaky blinders, so you'll have to bear with me.....this first chapter is pretty "immersive" to the first half of episode one, but i imagine everything after will follow much more loosely. you definitely don't need to be a peaky fan or a history fan for this fic, promise <3
> 
> this chapter was about setting mood, introducing plot, and redefining characters. i hope you like what you see so far. this is unbeta'd, so bear with me. if you have any questions about the story/the history/or anything drop me a comment or talk to me [here](https://onthesea-mystery.tumblr.com/).
> 
> love you lots!
> 
> oh & i promise more Mysteries of Love soon soon soon!


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